I stood on the cold stone step with Harold corkscrew in my hand, and I looked at the deputy, a tall young woman named Alvarez with a clipboard on her belt. “Deputy, it is not true,” I said. “I will show you how I know.” I turned to the nearest bottle, number two, and found, taped beneath the green wax seal, a small waterproof envelope I had never noticed. Harold, bless him, had thought of everything. I slit the envelope with my thumbnail and drew out a thin sheet of paper, folded in four, covered with my husband square printing.
It was a signed purchase agreement. Pacific Silicon Devices, a company in Mountain View, California, had sold Harold Delacroix one thousand shares in August of 1979, at a price of twenty thousand dollars, paid by wire. The seller was one of the two founders, a young engineer named Daniel Chu. At the bottom, beside Harold signature, was a second one, in blue ink, and a notary stamp. Deputy Alvarez read it twice. “Mrs. Delacroix, this says your husband bought these shares legally,” she said. “It says he paid.” I said that I had never doubted it.
Preston, at the top of the stairs, made a sound like a kettle. “That is forged,” he said. “She is making it up.” I said I was eighty two years old and had not forged anything since a hall pass in 1957. Deputy Alvarez looked at him for a long moment. “Sir, you told me these certificates were stolen property,” she said. “You told me there was a partner. Do you have the partner name?” Preston opened his mouth. Nothing came out. I said, quietly, “Preston, Harold told me in 1999 that you were a good boy. I hope he was right.”
Twelve bottles sealed with green wax, a deputy with a clipboard, and a widow who found out what her husband really kept.
It turned out that Harold had made friends with Daniel Chu at a wine tasting in Napa in 1978. Chu had been a skinny young man with a stack of circuit diagrams, hunting for twenty thousand dollars to keep his company alive for one more month. Harold, who knew nothing about electronics, liked the way the boy talked about his work. He wired the money without telling me, because he had promised me a new tractor, and he knew I would be furious. He hid the certificates in the wine, in the one place no thief or bank officer would look, and told me never to sell them.
I called Daniel Chu that evening. He was seventy four, living in Palo Alto, and he cried on the telephone for ten minutes. “Mrs. Delacroix, your husband saved my company,” he said. “I have been trying to find him for decades. I was ashamed to be rich while he was just a winemaker.” The company had been acquired in 1986 by a well known firm in Cupertino. The twelve thousand shares, after forty years of splits, were now worth about forty one million dollars. I sat down on the cellar step. I laughed until my cane clattered on the stone.
The sheriff recovered the cellar wine from the auction house in three weeks, because the consignment form was forged and the house wanted no trouble. Four hundred and eleven bottles came home in a refrigerated truck, and a dozen neighbors from the valley helped carry them down into the cool dark under the barn, one by one, like a congregation. Preston did not attend. The district attorney, at my request, declined to prosecute him on condition that he leave the county and seek treatment for a gambling habit I should have noticed years ago.
I did not keep the money. I never wanted forty million dollars. I called a lawyer in Santa Rosa and set up the Harold and Frances Delacroix Foundation, which now builds housing for the farmworkers who pick our valley grapes, six hundred units in the first three years. Daniel Chu came out from Palo Alto in September and walked through the first finished apartments, with his hands behind his back and his eyes wet. “Harold would be proud,” he said. I told him that Harold would have wanted to know how the pinot tasted.
That evening Daniel and I sat on my porch with the last of the 1979 vintage, Harold own, from the twelve cellar bottles of real wine that had stood in the dark alongside the others. It was pale garnet in the glass and smelled of cherries and tea and a farm in the rain. We drank it slowly. He told me about circuits and I told him about pruning. Somewhere in the second glass, I told him that in all my years, I had never been able to tell a Cabernet from a Kool Aid, and we laughed until the crickets joined in.
Preston wrote me a letter at Christmas, from a clinic in Arizona. It was three pages long and honest. I did not reply at once. In the spring I sent him a postcard of the vineyard in bloom, and on the back I wrote, There is pruning to do in January, if you want it. He came. He worked the rows with a pair of shears and a bad back, saying little, and by April his hands were scarred and brown. I told him that Harold would have said a vine is just a plant that learns to forgive being cut.
On the first warm evening of June, I went down into the cellar alone. The bare bulb swung. Every rack was full again. I walked to the bottom shelf in the far corner, to the empty slot where bottle six had stood, and I laid there the little note Preston had left, folded and unsigned, with the green wax seal pressed over it. Then I switched off the light, and stood for a moment in the cool stone dark, and I thought of Harold, and the twelve bottles, and the love that hides in the strangest places.
