Chapter 6 - Unmasking the Pedigree
Henderson’s eyes flicked to the tin box, then to Clara, his professional detachment slipping for a fraction of a second.
"Mrs. McAllister," he said, clearing his throat. "This is an adult conversation between the principals. I suggest you go back inside where it’s warm."
"My husband built this house with sixty-penny nails and heart-redwood, Mr. Henderson," Clara said, walking slowly to the edge of the porch and standing beside me. "He didn't need a boy with grease on his hair to tell him where to stand on his own porch, and neither do I."
Amber let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. "Let her talk, Arthur. The more she babbles about sixty years ago, the easier the competency hearing will be on Tuesday."
"Is that what you told the girl at the boutique in San Francisco?" Clara asked. "The one on Post Street?"
Amber froze. Her mouth stayed open half an inch, the smile dying on her lips like an insect hitting a hot stove.
"What are you talking about?"
Clara reached into the pocket of my father's shirt and pulled out a small, pale blue slip of paper. It was a carbon copy of a credit card receipt, narrow and crumpled.
"When you were in my kitchen on Tuesday," Clara said, her voice calm and level, "you dropped your handbag on my drop-leaf table. When you pulled out that dirty little quitclaim deed, this came out with it. It fell between the leaves of the table. I didn't see it until I washed the oilcloth after you left."
Clara held the paper out toward the headlights.
"It’s from the Shell station on Highway 128, just outside of Cloverdale," Clara said. "Dated Tuesday afternoon, three-fifteen. You bought twenty gallons of premium and a pack of mints. Cloverdale isn't on the way to San Francisco from the vineyard, Amber. It’s on the way down from the family cabin in Mendocino. The one your father had to mortgage three months ago to pay the interest on the Harrow Ridge bottling line."
Henderson turned his head sharply toward Amber. "Amber, what is that?"
"It’s nothing," Amber hissed, her face going from pale to an ugly, mottled red beneath the bruise. "The old woman is making things up. She’s senile."
"I am seventy-eight years old, child," Clara said. "I may have water in my knees, but I don't have water in my head. And I know your grandfather didn't have twenty dollars to his name until he stole the road money from the county in sixty-two."
Clara tapped the tin box in her hand.
"Daniel," she said to me. "Show Deputy Groth what’s in the tin."
I stepped down the three porch stairs.
Groth’s hand tightened on the butt of his sidearm. "Danny, stay where you are."
"Look at the paper, Tommy," I said, using the name he had worn on his jersey when we were seventeen. "Look at the paper or take your gun out and shoot me in front of these two sharks. Because that’s the only way you’re leaving this gulch without reading what’s in this box."
Groth looked at Henderson. Henderson’s face had gone completely grey. He was an old estate lawyer; he knew the smell of an unexploded ordnance better than anyone.
"Mr. McAllister," Henderson said, his voice dropping into a desperate, hurried cadence. "Whatever historical documents you think you possess, they are irrelevant to the current emergency order. If you approach the deputy, you are in violation of—"
"Shut up, Henderson," Groth said.
The deputy took two steps toward me, his heavy boots sinking into the wet fir needles. He took the paper stub and the photograph from my outstretched hand.
He held them under the beam of his heavy streamlight.
The clearing was dead quiet. The only sound was the wind in the firs and the high, thin whine of the Mercedes engine, which had begun to overheat as it sat idling in the cold mist.
Groth stared at the photograph. He stared at the purple stamp from the treasurer’s office. His eyes traveled over the signature of Treasurer Miller—the same Miller whose grandson was currently the presiding judge of the superior court in Santa Rosa.
"Tommy," Amber said, her voice rising into that shrill, dangerous register she used when a waiter brought the wrong brand of sparkling water. "Give those papers to Arthur. He is my legal counsel. You work for the county."
Groth didn't give the papers to Arthur.
He slowly lowered the streamlight. He looked at Amber, then at Henderson, and then back at me.
"This is Harold Vance’s signature," Groth said, his voice flat and heavy. "My dad worked the road crew for Harold back in the seventies. That’s his mark. The double loop on the V."
"It’s a forgery!" Amber shouted, stepping forward, her hands clenched into fists inside her ivory coat pockets. "My father owns the easement! We paid eighty thousand dollars for the tax assignment in Reno!"
"You paid eighty thousand dollars for a bucket of smoke, Amber," a new voice called out from the darkness behind the Mercedes.
A pair of yellow fog lights cut through the trees as an old, battered Subaru wagon rattled into the clearing, its muffler coughing like a dying tractor.
Marcus stepped out of the driver's side before the engine had even shuddered to a stop.
Under his arm, he carried a thick, blue linen-bound ledger with brass corners, covered in twenty years of basement dust and spider silk.
Beside him, stepping down into the mud with sensible rubber boots and a canvas barn coat, was Sarah Lin.
Sarah was thirty-two, the daughter of the valley’s historical society archivist, and the chief title examiner for the county records office in Napa. She was also the girl who had sat behind me in eighth-grade algebra, the girl who had spent the last five years quietly restoring the old township maps that Richard Vance had tried to have removed from the public library.
Sarah didn't look at Amber. She didn't look at Henderson. She walked straight to Deputy Groth, pulled a pair of cotton handling gloves from her coat pocket, and took the ledger from Marcus.
"Tommy," Sarah said, her voice calm, clear, and utterly professional. "I’ve been in the courthouse basement since midnight with Marcus. We pulled the original registry rolls for nineteen sixty-two."
She opened the blue ledger, turning the heavy, yellowed parchment pages until she reached a tab marked with red linen tape.
"The easement Harold Vance claimed to have purchased was never recorded as an encumbrance," Sarah said, pointing her small, clean finger at a double entry in the ledger. "It was recorded as a municipal bond. Harold Vance was the contractor, not the lender. The county paid him in full on December first, nineteen sixty-two, with warrant number 4412."
She looked up at Henderson, her brown eyes cold and steady.
"Your Reno shell company didn't buy a delinquent debt, Arthur. You bought a duplicate bond that was marked void sixty-one years ago. And Richard Vance filed an affidavit of ownership with the state water board last Friday claiming that debt was active."
Henderson closed his iPad. He didn't say a word. He tucked the leather case under his arm, turned on his heel, and walked back to the passenger side of the Mercedes.
"Arthur!" Amber screamed, her face twisting into a mask of pure, unadulterated venom. "Arthur, get back here! What is she talking about?"
"It’s over, Amber," Henderson said, his voice dead through the open window of the truck. "Get in the car."
"It is not over!" she shrieked. She turned on me, her boots splashing through the mud as she lunged toward the porch steps. "You think you’re smart, Daniel? You think you’re going to sit up here in this rot with your half-dead grandmother and your five acres of dirt? My father will buy every timber yard from here to Eureka! You won't get a stick of cedar! You won't get a gallon of fuel! I’ll burn this valley until you’re eating acorns out of the brush!"
"Amber," Groth said, stepping between her and the porch, his hand resting firmly on her ivory shoulder. "Get in the truck."
She pulled away from him like he had burned her.
"Don't you touch me, you miserable little five-thousand-dollar-a-year deputy! My father built your station house!"
Groth didn't blink. He was a slow man, a dull man sometimes, but he was a valley man. His people had been buried in the St. Helena churchyard alongside the McAllisters and the Millers for four generations.
"Miss Vance," Groth said, his voice dropping into that heavy, quiet rhythm that valley men use when the talk is finished. "You are currently on private property in violation of a registered easement notice. If you don't get into that Mercedes in ten seconds, I’m going to arrest you for criminal trespass and filing a false emergency order."
Amber looked at Groth. She looked at Sarah, who was already writing in her field notebook. She looked at Marcus, who was leaning against his Subaru with a grin so wide his ears were moving.
And then she looked at me.
Her face was white, the dark purplish mark on her cheek standing out like an ink blot on a clean sheet of paper. She looked at me with an hatred so pure, so absolute, that for a second she didn't look human at all. She looked like something made of glass that had just been dropped on a limestone floor.
"You were nothing," she whispered, her voice shaking with rage. "You were just a pair of hands."
"I know," I said. "And now they’re my own hands again."
She turned and marched through the mud to the Mercedes. The heavy door slammed with a sound like a small vault closing. The white truck backed out of the clearing, its high beams swinging wildly through the redwood branches, before roaring down the gulch road into the descending fog.
The silence that followed was immense.
The wind had died completely. Through the high needles of the firs, the first pale, lilac light of dawn was beginning to bleed into the eastern sky.
Deputy Groth took off his Stetson, wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and looked up at Clara.
May you like
"Miss Clara," he said, ducking his head. "I’m sorry for the disturbance."
"The disturbance is over, Tommy," Clara said, leaning her hand on my shoulder. "Go on home to your wife. Tell her I have two jars of plum preserves for her whenever she has the time to drive up the creek."
