Chapter 3
Tomás Vega stepped inside and closed the lab door behind him.
His boots left mud on the floor.
"Say it now," Elena said again.
So he said it.
"Block seven. The water was running at midnight."
"I opened the valve at 12:20."
"I walked the row at 12:40."
He stopped.
"There was a tractor in the dark. No lights on it."
Then Neal was in the doorway.
He must have followed the mud.
"He's an irrigator," Neal said. "He doesn't know what he saw."
Tomás looked at the floor.
"It was your tractor," he said.
Nobody moved.
Neal's sleeve was rolled to the elbow.
The scratch on his forearm was three inches long and still red at the edges.
Elena had seen it all morning and thought nothing of it.
Now she thought of the right palm of the glove.
Torn straight through.
Not a fall.
A fight.
The old man had been right about the hour.
He had been right about the water.
He had been right about the hand.
Neal had skimmed the accounts for four years.
Maren had found the shortfall a year ago.
She had told him she would strip him of the operation.
She had changed her will in the spring.
Neal had written the accident report himself.
And he had given it a first-light hour.
Forty-one percent of Sable Ridge had been hers.
A two-million-dollar policy had been his.
By Monday he would have lost both.
The old man stood up out of the flooded row.
Mud ran off him in ropes.
"You had the sun," he said.
"I had the water. The water doesn't lie."
Elena picked up the phone on the bench.
The sheriff's office was nine minutes away.
They came in two cars, up the gravel drive, past the blessing tables.
The crew was still at the crush pad, tipping the last bins.
Neal was standing with the foreman, smiling at something.
The deputies walked straight to him.
They put his hands behind his back in front of the whole crew.
The foreman dropped his clipboard.
A glass stopped halfway to a mouth.
Nobody said a word.
The blessing tent went silent under the fog.
One deputy lifted a page.
The accident report, in Neal's own handwriting.
The time on it. 5:50.
Beside it, the ledger. 12:20.
Beside that, two sealed sample bags.
The blood on the blade went to the county lab.
It came back hers.
By evening the county called the death what it was.
Maren Brask had not fallen.
Maren Brask had been murdered.
The winery named the newest row for her.
Maren's Row, on the south slope, where the light came first.
They let the old man keep the cottage at the head of the block.
They let him keep the key to the greenhouse.
The first morning after, he was on his knees in Maren's Row, pulling weeds.
He had forgotten his own address.
He had forgotten his own birthday.
But he had remembered the water.
And he had remembered his girl.
They took his memory years ago.
He kept the one thing that mattered.