Chapter 2 - THE NAME ON THE SCREEN
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The phone was still vibrating when Richard Vale stepped between Emily and the locked cellar door. His shoes crunched over glass, but his eyes never left her face.
"My attorney handles trespassers," he said. He spoke quietly now, a practiced change of tone meant to make anyone listening doubt what they had just witnessed.
Emily stayed beside Walter. Her cheek throbbed from Richard's slap, and her grandfather's wine-soaked cardigan clung heavily to his shoulders beneath the jacket she had given him.
"Then call her," Emily said. "Put Nora Chen on speaker." Richard looked toward the workers under the staircase, and neither man made a move for the cellar.
He ended the call instead. That single movement answered a question Emily had carried for weeks: Richard knew exactly where the attorney had been spending her time.
The oldest guest, a retired judge from Sacramento, cleared his throat and backed away from the wrecked table. Others followed him, ashamed of the silence they had offered earlier.
Mae Alvarez hurried forward with clean towels. She was a cellar assistant hired for the season, with dark curls pulled into a loose knot and a badge hanging crookedly from her apron.
"Mr. Ellis, there's a chair by the window," Mae said. Walter tried to refuse, but the room swayed when he straightened, and Emily guided him there without argument.
Richard pointed at Emily. "Damian, remove her." A security supervisor near the entrance hesitated, his hand resting on the radio clipped to his belt beneath his jacket.
"Sir, we've got a medical concern," Damian replied. He glanced at Walter, then at the scattered glass, as though calculating which choice might still allow him to sleep.
Emily took out her phone and called for medical assistance. She reported an elderly man who felt faint after a confrontation, then asked Mae to keep Walter warm.
"This is private property," Richard said. His voice had sharpened again, though the shattered bottles at his feet gave his authority an absurd and ugly backdrop.
"That doesn't erase what happened," Emily answered. "And it doesn't give you permission to move records while we're here." She saw the cellar workers exchange an uneasy glance.
Walter looked up sharply. "Don't let them take the blue ledgers," he whispered. Emily leaned closer, uncertain whether he meant the financial books or some older collection of vineyard notes.
"What blue ledgers?" she asked. His mouth moved without sound, and he closed his eyes with the exhausted expression of a man hearing a distant door slam.
Richard heard enough to stiffen. "The old man is confused," he announced. "He's been confused for years." Yet he was watching the workers instead of the paramedics' approaching lights.
Emily recorded that remark on her phone and held the screen visibly at her side. She had spent enough time around expensive lawsuits to know memory became fragile when power spoke first.
Through the glass entrance, an ambulance rolled to a stop among luxury cars. Its lights flashed against the vines, and two paramedics entered carrying a compact medical case and a folded stretcher.
Walter let them check his pulse and blood pressure. He was shaken and mildly dehydrated, they said, but alert; he agreed to further evaluation at the nearby medical center.
When the paramedics helped him stand, Richard made one final attempt to shape the story. "He was invited as a guest. His granddaughter assaulted me and damaged the property."
Mae stepped forward before Emily could respond. "I served the tasting," she said. "You poured wine over him. You struck her first. The camera saw everything."
Richard's face drained of color for a fraction of a second. Damian looked at the camera above the door, then silently unclipped the keys from his belt.
"The footage belongs to the estate," Richard warned. Mae stared back at him, trembling but unwilling to retreat. "So did the room," she said, "and you still broke its peace."
The paramedics escorted Walter outside. Emily followed, touching her grandfather's shoulder as he settled beneath a blanket and apologized for ruining what he called her entire afternoon.
"You didn't ruin anything," she told him. "The man who poured that wine did." Walter attempted a smile, but his eyes kept returning to the cellar staircase.
On the drive behind the ambulance, Emily called Nora Chen again. The number rang twice, then disconnected, leaving a brief hiss and a recording that said the mailbox was unavailable.
Nora had once answered Emily's questions with patient precision. Three weeks earlier, she had found a discrepancy in the Ellis family's ownership records and requested a confidential meeting.
Then Nora's office had reported that she was traveling, while Richard assured Emily the investigation was finished. Neither explanation had felt convincing, but Emily had lacked proof.
At the medical center, a nurse brought Walter dry clothes from the hospital's donation cupboard. Emily folded the ruined cardigan carefully, unwilling to let Richard's humiliation turn it into something disposable.
Under bright clinical lights, Walter looked older than he had that morning. His silver hair lay flat against his temples, and the skin around his eyes seemed paper-thin.
"He wants the cellar empty," Walter said when they were finally alone. "Your grandmother kept copies down there because she never trusted a single locked drawer."
Emily sat close enough to hear him over the hallway noise. "Copies of what, Grandpa?" He watched her for a long moment before answering, as though choosing whether to reopen a wound.
"The agreement that made this vineyard ours, too." His voice faltered. "Richard's father signed it with Clara. Richard knows exactly what his father promised."
Emily had grown up hearing about Clara Ellis as a gifted grower with stubborn hands and a laugh that carried across the vines. Nobody had ever mentioned an ownership agreement.
"Why didn't you tell me?" she asked. Walter rubbed his thumb against a pale scar near his wrist, the mark left by the old cellar fire years ago.
"Because I thought I'd already lost it," he said. "And because keeping you safe mattered more than proving I had been cheated." His honesty hurt more than another lie.
At 8:17 that evening, Emily's phone lit up with a message from an unknown number. The sender included no greeting, only a location and a warning.
MEET ME AT THE OLD COUNTY ARCHIVE. 9 P.M. DON'T LET RICHARD CLEAR THE CELLAR. — NORA.
Emily read the message twice. It could be a trap, but the building named in the text was one Nora had mentioned during their first conversation about the missing deeds.
She showed the screen to Walter. His expression changed when he saw the archive address, and he reached for her wrist with unexpected strength beneath the hospital blanket.
"Go," he said. "But promise me something. Whatever you find, don't make my shame the price of your future. Your grandmother would never have asked that of you."
Emily folded his hand between hers. "I'm not going because I'm ashamed of you," she replied. "I'm going because you should never have had to be afraid."
May you like
Outside the hospital window, the valley darkened beneath distant hills. At Bellwether Estate, workers were already carrying empty crates toward the cellar, and the night was not yet over.
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