Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (47 page)

Mr. Lucerno turned and offered her a cordial nod in greeting. “I was just passing by and thought I’d check in and see how the new prune barn is coming along.”

Rosa felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach, and for a moment she could only look back at him, unable to breathe.

“Mrs. Ottesen, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she managed to reply. She patted her tummy and forced a smile as if to indicate that only the normal pangs and discomforts of pregnancy troubled her. “I’m afraid we’ve only cleared away the rubble. This is one of our busiest times of the year on the vineyards and in the orchard. I—we didn’t realize the need was so urgent. We assumed you would find another place to work.”

He grimaced, clearly disappointed, and gestured to the high hills and the tall, concealing trees all around them. “We haven’t found anything as remote and secluded as this, not with such easy access to the pomace we need to make grappa.”

“There must be somewhere you could go.”

“You might be surprised, but some folks would rather be left alone even if it means passing up an easy five hundred bucks a month.” He paused and regarded her with intent curiosity. “You and your husband wouldn’t be those kind of people, would you, Mrs. Ottesen?”

It was simply too much. They would never be free of these men who hounded them like jackals, howling and nipping at their heels, waiting to pounce and rip out their throats the moment they sensed weakness. They would never be left alone.

“Yes, Mr. Lucerno,” she burst out, “we are exactly those sort of people. Please, please, try to understand. It’s too dangerous
to have you here any longer. We have young children. I’m going to have a baby. Agent Crowell is constantly breathing down our necks—”

“Hey. Hey.” Mr. Lucerno held up his palms. “Take it easy, cousin.” With a glance to her abdomen, he frowned and paced the length of the porch, then returned and halted in front of her. “Okay. Listen. You’re about to have a kid and that’s got you all worked up. I see that. And you’re right, that fed comes around so often I’d think he was sweet on you.”

Rosa shuddered. “Please don’t say that.”

“I’m not saying you enjoy it. Okay. Look. I’ll tell my boss that this isn’t a good place for our operation anymore. But he doesn’t like bad news. You’ve got to give me something to sweeten the taste.”

Rosa regarded him mutely, helpless and hopeless. She had no rescued grappa to load into his car this time, no refunded rent payment to make the injury sting a little less. She had nothing to offer him, nothing that he wanted, except—

“I know where you can find Lars Jorgensen,” she heard herself say. Her throat constricted in horror at the thought of what she had done, but she could not take the words back. With one sentence she had set foot upon a path she must follow to its end.

Mr. Lucerno shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

“I’m sure your employer has.” Rosa’s voice shook. “Have him ask his associates in Southern California if that name means anything to them and I bet he’ll like the answer. They’d probably pay him for the information, or at the very least, they’d owe him a favor.”

“Sometimes favors are better than cash.” Mr. Lucerno studied her. “All right. Whoever this fella is, how can we get our hands on him?”

Rosa shook her head. “You’ll have to figure out that part on your own.” It was the only measure of protection she could give him.

“You don’t want to implicate yourself. Fair enough. But you’ve got to give me more to go on than a name.”

Rosa plunged ahead, refusing, for the moment, to consider the consequences. “Talk to your boss’s friends in Southern California. Get his description and find out what he did to them. Then ask yourself, who showed up around here soon after Lars Jorgensen disappeared? Who looks like him and acts like him, down to his hatred for bootleggers?”

“All right. I can do that. Then what?”

“Your employer can do whatever he wants with this information. All I ask is that you never tell me what that is, and that you and your friends consider our property off limits from now on. Agreed?”

“If the information proves to be as valuable as you think it is,” Mr. Lucerno emphasized, “then I’d say you have a deal.”

He put out his hand, and they shook on it.

“Thank you,” Rosa told him. “Thank you and good-bye.”

“I’ll miss your prune pie, cousin.” He tugged the brim of his hat, nodded, and turned to go. When he reached the bottom of the porch stairs, he suddenly glanced to his right and raised his hand in greeting to someone who stood behind the house out of Rosa’s field of vision. As Mr. Lucerno walked on, Lars came around the corner and halted, looking up at her without a word.

He waited until Mr. Lucerno crossed the footbridge and disappeared behind the redwoods.

“Rosa,” he said, pained, “what have you done?”

What was necessary,
she thought, but could not say aloud.
Only what was necessary.

• • •

Dwight Crowell never returned to Sonoma Rose Vineyards and Orchard. Neither did Albert Lucerno, just as he had promised.

A few days after Crowell’s last visit, his car was found abandoned on a rural back road outside Geyserville, the windshield shattered, the sides pockmarked with bullet holes, the driver’s seat splattered with dried blood. The doors were closed, the handles wiped clean. The agent himself was nowhere to be found.

A month passed. The detectives investigating his disappearance were stymied, and anonymous sources from within the department admitted that only a handful of tips had come in, all of them useless, and that the trail was stone cold. It didn’t look good for the missing agent, they said, a man with few ties to the area, no family back in Los Angeles to speak of, a man whose job was his life. Officials from the Prohibition bureau acknowledged that a man like Dwight Crowell made a lot of enemies in the course of performing his duties. The people of Sonoma County, especially, owed him a debt of gratitude for his diligence and steadfastness on their behalf.

A year after his disappearance, a memorial service was held in his honor in Santa Rosa. No one Rosa knew attended.

A
month after Dwight Crowell’s mysterious disappearance, Alegra Del Bene and Gino came home to Santa Rosa. Rosa sat beside her and held her hand as Alegra tearfully told Paulo how the corrupt agent had intimidated and coerced her. Paulo wept and embraced his wife, declaring that whoever had killed Crowell had done a great service to the community and had spared Paulo the trouble and sin of killing him with his own hands.

Later, Rosa repeated his words to Lars. “I don’t disagree,” said Lars, gently and with an undercurrent of sorrow, “but I still wish you hadn’t struck the match that lit that fire.” Then he held her and kissed her to show he understood why she had done it, and that he had forgiven her.

It took much longer for her to forgive herself.

In July, Alegra was there to hold Rosa’s hand when she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy.

In the months leading up to the baby’s arrival, Lars had
asked Rosa if she preferred a Spanish name, like those she had given her other children. Dredging up a painful memory from the first year of her marriage, Rosa told Lars that throughout her first pregnancy, John had insisted upon the name John Junior if they had a boy, and Mildred, after his grandmother, if they had a girl. When Rosa gave birth two months earlier than John had expected and he realized the child was not his, he had immediately changed his mind. “Call her anything else,” he had said, handing the baby back to Rosa. “Call her whatever you like.”

On her own, Rosa had chosen the name Marta after her father’s mother.

When their first son was born, John, certain the child was his, named him after himself. But John Junior died, and after that, John no longer cared what the children were named. They were more Rosa’s children than his, he seemed to think, and so they might as well bear Spanish names, like hers. They would die young anyway. It would be a waste to bestow an important Barclay family name upon any one of them.

In suggesting they choose a Spanish name for their child, Lars had only meant to honor Rosa’s heritage. He didn’t know, and it pained him to recall how Rosa had suffered throughout her marriage to John, a marriage she never would have made except for his own failure to be the man she needed all those years ago. After Rosa finished her story, Lars understood that the best way to honor her and their child was to give the baby a name from his side of the family. And so they named their son Mathias, after Lars’s father.

Shortly after Mathias’s first birthday, Dante Cacchione was released from prison. He returned home haggard and thin, but with a fierce gleam in his eye that hinted at a newly kindled fire.
Throughout his imprisonment, rather than give in to despair and loneliness and boredom, he had devoted his time to the study of the law, poring over an incomplete collection of dated, worn law books kept in the small prison library until he had committed it to memory. He wrote eloquent, compelling letters to the editor of every newspaper in Sonoma County and throughout the Bay Area, shedding light on the lives of his fellow prisoners, how they were treated, how poverty and lack of opportunity had led more men to prison than greed or cruelty or any other oft-cited cause.

When Dante was finally permitted to return home to his family, he became known as a socialist firebrand, and whenever the downtrodden needed an advocate, he could be counted on to speak up for them. He also passionately argued the case for the repeal of Prohibition to any public official who would listen to him—and many more who wished he would give up and go away. But he wouldn’t go away, nor would he be silenced. He wove together statistics and anecdotes to prove how the so-called Great Experiment had achieved none of its lofty goals and had created more crime and economic hardship than its framers could have possibly imagined. The more he spoke out, the more other people agreed with him.

But in spite of Dante’s withering condemnation of Prohibition, the Cacchione family abandoned bootlegging after selling off the vintages stored in the old wine cellar. If not for their prunes and walnuts, they wouldn’t have been able to afford to pay their property taxes, but there was little money left over for other necessities. After a few years of poor grape harvests and dismal wine grape sales, the Cacchiones were forced to sell off acres of their beloved vineyard. Through it all, they firmly held on to Dante’s beloved old Zinfandel vines, refusing to give up
all hope that one day they would be allowed to resume the honored traditions of winemaking that their family had followed for generations.

Young Mathias Ottesen was two years old when Rosa and Lars were blessed with another son, whom they named Oscar, after Lars’s brother. Baby Oscar was only six weeks old when Rosa learned of John’s early release from prison from a newspaper clipping Mrs. Phillips sent her from San Francisco.

The same article also provided a terse account of John’s death.

John had served two years of his five-year sentence on federal racketeering charges and had been granted parole on account of good behavior. Three weeks after his release, a hiker had discovered his broken body at the bottom of Salto Canyon, and after a thorough investigation, the coroner had concluded that he had jumped to his death.

What the newspaper did not record, and what Rosa never learned, was that in the aftermath of John’s suicide, rumors swept through the Arboles Valley like summer fire through chaparral. Some people thought he had killed himself out of prolonged grief for his drowned wife and children. Others, more cynical, noted that with his postmaster job gone and his ties to organized crime severed, John had realized he would actually have to work for a living again, and he had preferred to die. A few people whispered that he had not intended to take his own life but that he had fallen to his death after fleeing in terror from the ghost of Isabel Rodriguez Diaz, whose spirit was known to haunt the mesa.

Rosa found no satisfaction in the news of John’s death. Someday, when the children were old enough to understand, it
would fall to her to tell them that he had taken his own life. She didn’t know how she would explain to them something she could not understand.

When he was three months old, Oscar Ottesen made his first trip to San Francisco to attend the wedding of his parents, Nils Ottesen and Rosa Diaz. When they applied for the marriage license, Rosa was able to produce her birth certificate, but Nils Ottesen, a native of Stavanger, California, had nothing to show except his driver’s license and voter registration card. But the five older children confirmed his identity—he was Nils Ottesen, their pa—so the city clerk shrugged, accepted their fee in cash, and signed the necessary documents.

The newlyweds and their six children spent the weekend enjoying the sights of the city and the hospitality of Mrs. Phillips’s boardinghouse. Each morning they breakfasted upon waffles with strawberries and whipped cream—except for Ana and Miguel, who had corn cakes with their strawberries and whipped cream instead. Although they still had to follow Dr. Haas’s banana diet, they were so healthy and vigorous that Mrs. Phillips declared she hardly recognized them as the poor dears who had crossed her threshold four years before.