Plum Gone: A Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mystery (Sonoma Wine Country Cozy Mysteries Book 2) (5 page)

“You mean because of the arrest?” Emma asked, glancing back at him.

Silas shook his head. “No. I’ve been providing the site maps for HoCo’s due diligence. You see, there’s a problem. Pollution has been detected in one of the water tanks. No one knows for sure how deep it goes. Into the wells? The water table? Of course, no one around here cares about historic trees. The question is whether the pollution of our water table might generate a little public outrage to block the sale.”

Emma stared back at Silas in surprise. “You mean, cause Mr. Ho to back out?” Piers hadn’t mentioned a thing about pollution of the Randall plum ranch water supply, but it certainly would explain his desire to close the deal quickly.

“Mr.
Huang
,” Silas corrected her. “They do it backwards in China.” He blushed and, for a second, Emma thought he was going to cry again. “I thought you might have heard something…”

A light suddenly went on in Emma’s head. Silas had seen Piers’ name on the purchase and sale documents and knew she was Curt Randall’s lawyer’s mother-in-law.

“HoCo won’t back out,” Silas continued, lowering his voice. “But surely the Chinese will ask to renegotiate the sale price. Randall’s
lawyer
will probably push to close the sale quickly. Before anything worse comes to light and the locals finally wake up. But face it, HoCo won’t do anything about pollution to our water table. The Chinese don’t care about pollution. Just look at Beijing. Of course, as far as I’m concerned destroying those historic plum trees is criminal. You may remember that I tried, unsuccessfully, to organize a protest about
that.
”

Silas glared at Emma when he spoke. As though she were personally to blame for his failure.

He rolled his eyes and gestured at the handful of people in the minivan, “But, of course, who cares about
history
these days.” He smirked, “Maybe poisoning our water supply will awaken these idiots to what’s happening to
our
land.”

Emma looked away again. She well remembered Silas’s attempts to rally support to save the plum trees. In fact, at the time, she’d felt guilty about not joining in the cause. Even more guilty because she knew the only reason she didn’t call the number on the flier she found in her mailbox was because her son-in-law was involved in the deal.
Other people will help save the trees,
she’d assured herself. But no one had.

Silas touched her lightly on the arm. When Emma glanced back at him, something about the intensity of his stare almost frightened her.

“Is there anyone you could talk to, I mean directly?” he said. “Someone, perhaps, who’s involved in the deal? Anything you could do, personally, to stop this…this slaughter of our trees?”

Emma felt her jaw clamp shut. “I can’t,” she whispered through clenched teeth, angry at being pulled further into the old man’s conflict.

Silas shifted his gaze over her shoulder and out the window. The van had pulled off the highway and was headed into downtown Santa Rosa. A few minutes later, it came to a stop across the street from City Hall.

Silas rose from his seat and turned to address the occupants of the van. “All right everyone…” He glanced around the bus. “We have reached our morning’s destination. The van will drop us at the main entrance to the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens. I will guide you on a tour of this extraordinary man’s home. Do not wander. Please stay with me throughout our tour of this registered national, state and city historic landmark.”

The van deposited its occupants at the front entrance of the white wood framed Victorian building. In many ways, Emma noted, the famed Luther Burbank’s home resembled her own little Blissburg farmhouse. Half the house was one story, its entrance off of a long covered front porch. The other half was two stories high, with two large downstairs windows and a single window in the middle of the second story under the peak of the roof. Indeed, many old houses in Santa Rosa resembled the modest, welcoming little cottage – a far cry from Burbank’s much larger brick Lancaster, Massachusetts birthplace pictured inside the Santa Rosa museum.

But that was Luther Burbank’s style, Silas informed the Sunday Strollers as they stood listening to his informative lecture, staring about the horticulturalist’s unpretentious living room. The inventor of the Russet potato, the freestone peach and the beloved Santa Rosa plum – to name just a few of the over 800 varieties of plants that the world famous horticulturist and botanist developed over his fifty-five year career – was, Silas explained, a kind and humble man. A man devoted to humanity and to nature in all its forms. His home, where he had hosted friends like the inventor Thomas Edison and the industrialist, Henry Ford, bore witness to his simple tastes.

As one friend and admirer, the Paramahansa Yogananda phrased it, in a quotation from his book,
Autobiography of a Yogi
that Emma found printed on a T-shirt in the Burbank Home and Garden gift shop:

“…he knew the worthlessness of luxury, the joy of few possessions.”

Later, in the garden, while extolling the special qualities of the famed Santa Rosa plum, Silas Bugbee broke down one more time:

“You see,” he explained, “the Santa Rosa plum was Mr. Burbank’s crown jewel.”

Silas had been speaking to the Strollers gathered in the middle of the lush Burbank gardens. As he spoke the words “crown jewel,” like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, the young man produced a perfect, golf ball sized plum out of the coarse leather saddlebag he always wore strapped across his chest. The effect was as dramatic as the gesture. Strollers gasped. He might as well have pulled out the Crown Jewels themselves.

“The full, sweet flavor,” Silas explained, biting into the taut, perfectly colored skin, “is balanced by just a hint of tartness. Note how the rich, purple hue on the outside hides juicy yellow flesh blushing along its perimeter as though embarrassed by its own sensuality. Finally,” he added inhaling deeply while sticky juice overflowed his glistening lips and dripped down his fingers, “experience the mouthiness, if you will. The compact size, pulsing with flavor.”

As he spoke, Emma experienced what felt like a hot flash. Trish, standing next to her, inhaled sharply and opened her fan. Then, just as he finished speaking, Silas pulled more flawless purple Santa Rosa plums out of his satchel, and passed them around.

There was a brief pause in the lecture while the Strollers sucked on their plums.

“On a personal note,” Silas continued, “unfortunately Luther Burbank, a transplant himself, from Massachusetts - the man who knew how to make anything and everything increase and multiply - ”

At this point Silas did choke up and was unable to continue. He pulled out his hanky and wiped his eyes.

“Except,” he finally resumed his lecture, “except for himself. Unfortunately, Luther Burbank died childless.”

Silas’ performance was so moving a few of the Walkie-Talkies embraced him in a group hug before breaking down in tears.

Silas waved them away so he could continue.

“This true servant of humanity,” he concluded, “gave generously to local schools, worked tirelessly to provide better and more abundant nourishment to mankind, and eventually, without heirs of his own, gave all this,” Silas gestured to the home and gardens, “to us. He died, here, on April 11, 1926 and is buried on these grounds near the greenhouse. We will now make our way to his last resting place. If you will please follow me.”

“Wow,” Emma remarked to Tom Fitzgerald as they walked to the famed horticulturalist’s grave.  “Somebody sure had his priorities straight. I think I’ll bring my daughter here. And my grandson.”

“Too bad a man like that never had children,” Tom replied.

Emma was about to agree, but Silas had overheard Tom’s remark. Before Emma could speak, the young man shook his head.

“No,” he snapped. “You are wrong, Tom. If Luther Burbank had had children, he’d never have left all this to us.” He gestured around the property again, the gardens blooming with roses, the hothouses filled with endlessly new varieties of life. “These
are
his children.” He glared pointedly at Emma. “Too bad
our
children don’t understand the priceless nature of his gifts.”

Emma spent the rest of Sunday preparing for the wine tasting at Sergio’s restaurant. Over the past year its owner, Sergio Santagrata had become her good friend. And Jack’s new business partner. Jack had actually bailed Sergio out of serious financial difficulties shortly after saving Emma’s life. Sergio was a fine chef, but he was a terrible businessman.

Emma had recently enlisted his help preparing her new cookbook in collaboration with Buchanon Vineyards,
What a Pair: Eating and Drinking Locally in Sonoma.
The cookbook consisted of thirty breakfast, lunch and dinner menus. Emma’s job was to research and test each recipe used in the book, all using locally grown ingredients.

She would be serving one of the dinner menus for Jack and his guests at the dinner for six he purchased at the Opera in the Vineyards fundraiser the night they first met. The dinner she selected included one of her personal favorite recipes: spinach and ricotta gnocchi, light fluffy balls of cooked chopped spinach, ricotta cheese, egg yolks and parmesan rolled in flour and boiled for a few seconds in water till they floated to the top. The trick with the
malfatti
(a word she’d learned meant “badly made” in Italian) was to make sure they didn’t fall apart when they were boiled. There was no miracle cure if that happened - like adding ice cubes to a curdled
sauce Bernaise.
There was just a soggy mess.

Emma intended to serve the
malfatti
in a sauce made by sautéing a large clove of garlic and a few chopped basil leaves with fresh cherry tomatoes in a little olive oil, and letting it simmer until the tomatoes burst into a light sweet sauce. The trick with the sauce was not to burn it. And finding the right ratio of olive oil to tomato. The
malfatti
were light. Too much tomato drowned out their flavor. Too much oil…well, of course, that was
never
good.

Those were the recipes she tested all Sunday afternoon, and intended to “pair” with just the right wines at Sergio’s that night. Even for home-testing the recipes, she had bought all the ingredients locally. The ricotta from Sorellina’s Creamery. The spinach from Tasso Farms. Of course, May was too early for local tomatoes. Many Sonoma gardeners didn’t even plant their tomatoes until the end of May. Emma had tested her recipe with greenhouse tomatoes. Good local tomatoes would not be available until late July at the very earliest. The best did not appear until September.

At quarter to five Emma had finished cleaning up her kitchen. She stored the sauce she made in a glass container and put it in the fridge. Then she climbed the stairs to her bedroom to dress for dinner. Jack would arrive in a few minutes. He hated to wait.

She was just buttoning up a vintage Marimekko tent dress in bold pink and red stripes when she saw Jack’s Tesla pull into her driveway. She shoved her feet into her old, comfortable black Tods loafers and grabbed her black cotton French painter’s jacket out of the closet. The night promised to be mild. Her faux Goyard sac hung on a peg by the front door. She let herself out and locked up. Jack was getting out of the car.

They kissed each other lightly on each cheek before he opened the door for her. Jack’s manners never ceased to amaze Emma. Though he wore his working class background on his sleeve, Jack’s manners were strictly Emily Post. The original 1922 edition of the etiquette book
.
Emma suspected that somewhere along the line Jack had memorized it.

Emma settled back into the now familiar passenger seat of Jack’s navy blue luxury car. The one the VC had invested in. Early. The only car that Jack once said he “truly desired.”
He said it like he meant it
, Emma thought, staring at Jack’s determined profile maneuvering the car around the old magnolia and down the driveway to the street.
Like a man still capable of desire.

He wasn’t a handsome man, she reminded herself. His face was too beat up for that. Too many broken noses, dislocated jawbones and black eyes playing hockey. But she had to admit the man was attractive. At least the women of Blissburg thought so. Maybe it was because all that damage somehow proved he was a survivor. W
omen like survivors
, she mused.

As for what the men of Blissburg thought of Jack? Emma had learned that what you heard about Jack Russo depended on whom you spoke to. Those who’d
had
a run in with Jack offered grudging respect. Those who hadn’t – or those like her son-in-law who worked for him – treated him gingerly, like an unexploded hand grenade.

One thing was certain, however. Men trusted Jack Russo. They trusted him to be an enormous pain until he got his way. Which he usually did.

“How was the Stroll?” Jack asked as Emma buckled her seatbelt. “What’s new with Luther Burbank?”

“The Stroll was interesting,” Emma answered. “And a little bit sad. It seems the man who knew how to make everything else increase and multiply never had any children of his own.”

“So he left us Santa Rosa plums instead,” Jack replied. “They were his children.” He stopped talking for a few seconds before adding with a sigh, “And I’ll bet those plums never broke his heart.”

Emma waited for Jack to continue. When she determined that he would not, she decided there was no use prodding him. She changed the subject.

“How was hockey?” she asked. Talking about his grandsons always brought a smile to Jack’s face.

“You know, Emma,” he replied, his voice recapturing all the enthusiasm it had lacked a moment before. “I was just thinkin’ about that driving over to your place tonight. Why the heck do I get such a kick out of being with those boys? There is very little, in fact, that I enjoy more than their company. I’m ashamed to say it, honestly, I don’t remember having so much…fun…with my own…”

“Do you think it’s because now you have boys?” Emma asked.

For a few moments Jack seemed lost in thought. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he finally said, decisively.

He didn’t look at Emma, which was unusual because he frequently took his eyes off the road to glance at her when he spoke.

“I really don’t think it’s that,” he continued. “See Cara was always very athletic. She even joined an ice hockey team – I think she was around eleven. Looking back, I guess the poor kid was tryin’ to get my attention. I traveled a lot,” he shrugged. “Always chasing a deal.”

“It’s a pretty common story, Jack,” Emma said.

“Yeah,” he answered. “But that’s water under the bridge, isn’t it?” He shook his head, “Anyway, what I figured out is that grandchildren are different. I don’t mean that cliché about how grandparents get to have fun and then drop the little buggers off with the parents when they’re tired and cranky. I’m talkin’ about how the whole thing is different.”

He stopped for a moment as if to collect his thoughts. Then he continued. “At the rink today, Emma, it was like hockey practice when I was a kid. I never wanted to get off the ice. I looked at my grandsons skating around the rink – Josh skates backwards great, by the way. Mikey junior – not so good. I wasn’t lookin’ at my watch wondering when it would end. I wasn’t checkin’ email. I was there. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. And the best part is, the kids knew it. That there was nowhere else their granddad would rather be than with them. Havin’ fun.”

Emma felt a surge of something when Jack stopped talking. It was warm, and crept over her in places she hadn’t felt in years. She hoped it wasn’t love. That would complicate things. She liked their friendship simple. The way it was.

She took a deep breath. “You know, Jack,” she said. “I don’t think I could have phrased it better, myself. That’s exactly how I feel when I’m with Harry. That I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

And because that was true. Because Jack’s treasuring his time alone with his grandsons gave Emma the freedom to treasure her time alone with Harry, any jealousy she might have felt about his comment vanished into thin air.

They had pulled up to the service entrance behind Sergio’s restaurant. Since bailing Sergio out of his financial troubles and buying into the business, Jack had a parking space just to the left of the restaurant’s back door. He turned off the ignition and got out of the car. By the time Emma had gathered up her purse and unbuckled her seatbelt, Jack was opening her door.

Sunday night at Sergio’s was wine pairing night. Representatives of three or four of the many local vineyards prepared a tasting and then educated the customers on the optimal wine for each of their courses. That night, among others, Barry Buchanon from Buchanon Vineyards had brought along his master vintner, Giuseppe Pieri, an eighty year old Italian from Lucca in Tuscany. Despite almost fifty years living in Sonoma County, Peppino, as he was locally known, still spoke Italian like a Tuscan, pronouncing the soft “c” before a vowel like a “sh”. So for
cento
or a hundred, he said “shento” instead of “chento”; “shinque” for “cinque” or “five”.

Emma loved practicing her Italian with the tall, blue-eyed, ruddy-faced man when she visited the Buchanon Vineyard to research her book
.
Even in his eighties, Peppino knew how to flirt.

“
Ciao, bella
,” he called to her from behind the restaurant’s sleek mahogany and steel bar - interrupting an animated conversation in Italian with Sergio, the restaurant’s owner and celebrity chef.

Emma waved back. Then Sergio broke away from the conversation to take Emma and Jack to what had become their usual table near the kitchen.

“
Ciao
, Em-ma,” he greeted Emma with a cursory kiss on each cheek, pronouncing each of the m’s in her name, Italian style. “
Come va
, Jack? What’s up?” he added to Jack. Despite his friendly greeting, something in the young man’s tone signaled to Emma that Sergio was annoyed.

“
Senti
, listen,” he added, squatting down by their table as they took their seats. “Peppino will be over in a minute. I know you want to talk to him about some wines for your dinner, Jack. But I gotta warn you, the old man’s making me trouble.”

“Trouble?” Jack asked.

“He’s steamed because the HoCo guys dropped by tonight for dinner. They’re staying out at the Honorage Inn and Spa. This morning, Barry invited them up to Buchanon Vineyards to look around and Peppino lost his temper. You know. Same old thing about the Made in China wine. Now they turn up here as my customers and Peppino refuses to talk to them.” Sergio pounded the table in frustration jiggling the forks and knives. “I told him, I can’t do that. Somebody comes to my restaurant, I gotta serve them. And you know what he says?” Sergio looked at Jack.

Jack shrugged.

“He said, ‘just like a Sicilian. You’d do business with the devil,’” Sergio replied.

Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “What did
you
say?”

“Nothing,” Sergio answered. “Next thing, you two walked in. Besides,” he added, “what could I say? I
would
do business with the devil – as long as he pays his bill.”

“Forget about it,” Jack said, eyeing the customers in the restaurant over Emma’s shoulder. “So where are they?”

“Who?” Sergio asked.

“The Chinese,” Jack replied, his eyes still scanning the room. Then he stopped and squinted at a table in the far corner of the crowded restaurant. “
Do
they pay their bill?”

“I’ll say,” Sergio laughed. “And they know a lot more about what they’re eating than the dumb clucks from Marin who don’t know a
Bolognese
sauce from tomato ketchup. But when they practice their Italian…” he shook his head. “It’s murder. I gotta give them credit, though. They try. And the clothes?” Sergio kissed his fingertips. “Hand made suits – Kiton, Etro sportswear. I wish I could afford to dress like that. Look at them.”

Emma turned, in spite of herself, to follow Sergio’s and Jack’s eyes to the table. Four Chinese men sat there conversing, obviously enjoying their meal.  Even from a distance, they looked impressive in their beautifully tailored suits and designer ties. Emma guessed there was nothing “Made in China” about them except themselves.

“So, what did they order?” Emma asked.

“Potato
gnocchi
and the veal
Bolognese
,” Sergio answered.

“What wine did they choose?” Jack added, “without the benefit of Peppino’s expert advice, I mean.”

Sergio waved his hand up and down, sideways. “They knew exactly what they wanted. And they chose well. A 2011 Soliste St. Andelain
Sauvignon Blanc
with the gnocchi. And a 2012 Two Shepards Saralee
Grenache Noir
with the veal. I might have chosen a different red; but...” he shrugged. “All this in Italian, mind you. Which was pretty good except for putting the accents on all the wrong syllables.”

“They’re dropping a bundle,” Jack laughed. “You’re right. Only a dumb Lucchese like Peppino Pieri would turn away business like that.”

Emma winced. Peppino was waving, walking towards their table. Thank goodness the only thing wrong with the hearty old Tuscan was that he was hard of hearing.