Phần I
The first thing she felt was gravel.
Cold, wet gravel against her cheek, and somebody's hand slapping her face, not gently. The second thing was air. It came into her lungs like water into a drowning man, enormous and painful, and she rolled onto her side and coughed until she thought her ribs would crack.
"That's it. Breathe. Breathe, Claire. Breathe."
Ines Ortega was kneeling over her in the dark, headlamp still on, her braid come loose, her face white in the backwash of the light. Behind her, the oak door at the bottom of the stone winery steps stood wide open. A thin, cold mist was rolling out of it and down the gravel like dry ice off a stage.
"How -" Claire's voice came out as a scrape.
"I was up on the Ridge with the night crew. I saw the work light come on down here at midnight. Nobody's turned on a light in that room in twenty years." Ines sat back on her heels. Her hands were shaking. "Then it went off. So I came down. The door was bolted. From out here. You were lying against the inside of it, on the top step. Like you'd crawled up." She didn't need to say what that meant. The gas fills from the bottom. The top step was the last place with air. Claire had no memory of coming down the ladder at all.
Claire tried to sit up. The world tilted and came back.
"There was a hose," she said. "Under the door. Somebody was pumping gas in."
Ines turned her headlamp on the doorway. On the bottom of the door. On the gravel. On the stone steps going down into the dark.
There was no hose. There was no cylinder. There was nothing on the gravel at all but Claire's own scuff marks and Ines's boot prints.
"I came down that path in four minutes," Ines said slowly. "Whoever it was had four minutes."
Claire looked down at her right hand. It was clenched so tight the knuckles were white. She opened it, finger by finger.
The faded plastic bin tag lay in her palm. BLOCK: RIDGE · TANK: 7 · 10/10/06 - 11:40 PM · PICKED BY: and the scratched-out name.
Whoever had come back for the hose had not been able to take that.
Sam arrived at a run ten minutes later, in boots and boxer shorts and a Bellandi Hill fleece, because Ines had called him. Paige came behind him in a silk robe, her hair down, her arms folded tight across her chest.
Sam went down the steps with a flashlight and came back up.
"The new fermentation hall vents through the old drains," he said. "When we're running eight tanks, the gas backs up into that room. It happened in 2015. A temp worker passed out cold." He crouched beside Claire and looked into her eyes, checking her pupils like a medic. His voice was gentler than it had been at dinner. "You can't go down there in crush, Claire. You know that. You grew up here."
"The door was bolted, Sam."
"That bolt drops on its own if you slam the door. It's a hundred and thirty years old."
"I didn't slam it."
Paige bent down and put a hand on Claire's shoulder. "Sweetheart, you'd had a lot of wine. After last night, after everything with Victor - anyone would be rattled."
Claire breathed in. She couldn't help it. Three short pulls.
Paige's hand smelled like expensive night cream. And under it, faint, the way you smell a cork that's gone bad before you've even pulled it: rubber. Black rubber. And the damp mineral mold of a cellar.
Paige took her hand away.