Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (37 page)

“Two hundred gallons is better than no wine at all,” Rosa persisted. “The day Prohibition is repealed, customers will come from miles around to buy every drop of wine you have in your cellar. But that’s only if you have wine to sell. You’ll earn exactly nothing from every barrel of wine you decide not to make.”

“She’s right,” said Vince. “We should keep back two hundred gallons of the vintages that’ll age well and sell everything else. That way we’ll be prepared.”

“We should clear that cellar of every barrel, cask, and growler and not even think about replenishing them until it’s legal to do so,” Mabel countered. “And that day may never come. As long as there’s a Republican president in the White House, Prohibition will be the law of the land, no matter how many families it bankrupts, no matter how many gangsters it enriches. They don’t care what happens to people like us, as long as they get their share.”

“Let’s all take a deep breath,” advised Dominic. “In the end, it’s Ma’s decision, and we’ll abide by what she says.”

“No, that’s not how I want this to be,” said Giuditta. “If we do sell our wine, we’ll all take on the risks involved, so we should all share in the decision. That’s why I’ve included you in this discussion, Nils and Rose, for all that Rose insists that it’s a family matter.”

“Well, you all know how I feel,” said Mabel wearily. “I think we should sell all the wine and be finished with bootlegging once and for all. We shouldn’t crush this fall or make any new wine until and unless it’s legal to do so. We can still grow and sell wine grapes. We still have prunes and walnuts, and in a few years we’ll have apricots. That will have to be enough.”

“Even if we’re tightfisted, that probably
won’t
be enough,”
said Vince. “The feds don’t know about the old wine cellar and they don’t ever have to find out. We should go on as we have been—except no more selling glasses of wine to passing tourists, Ma. We’ll sell to the hotels and speakeasies in San Francisco and nowhere else. As for new wine, I think we should make all we want. No two-hundred-gallon limit for me. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”

“Better not to be hanged at all,” said Francesca with a shudder. “I think we should keep all the wine in the old cellar locked up good and tight, and not crush this fall. I don’t think Pa would want any of us to join him in prison.”

“We won’t get caught,” scoffed Vince.

“Ma got caught.”

“We won’t repeat her mistakes.”

“No, we’ll make fresh new ones, especially now that the police are watching us more closely than ever.”

“Children, please,” said Giuditta. “Don’t bicker.”

“What do you think, Nils?” asked Dominic.

Lars folded his arms across his chest, weighing his words carefully. “I think you should keep two hundred gallons of the vintages that will age well, so that you’ll have inventory on hand to sell should Prohibition end. Dump the rest of the wine and make no more.”

“Dump it?” exclaimed Rosa. “Think of all the years of hard work and time and patience that wine represents. How would your family feel if apricots were suddenly declared illegal and Crowell and his men emptied out your drying sheds and ordered you not to grow any more? Would you cut down every apricot tree on the Jorgensen ranch?”

Abruptly she fell silent, realizing she had said too much even before Lars shot her a warning look. “Apricots are not
wine, and it’s a fallacy to compare the two,” he said. “I’m not suggesting the Cacchiones should uproot their grapevines. They can still grow and sell wine grapes. Anything else is too risky considering they’re known bootleggers.”

“Find me a grape grower in all of Sonoma County who isn’t a bootlegger,” said Vince.

“The Del Benes and the Vanellis, just to name two,” said Francesca. “We should take a page from their book. How do they get by?”

“With the help of a sacramental wine permit in one case and table grapes in the other,” said Dominic. “We don’t have those options.”

The debate wore on until late in the evening, when everyone ran out of arguments and Giuditta said that she would sleep on it and let them know her decision in the morning. It seemed to Rosa that everyone left the table worried and dissatisfied in varying degrees. There was, simply, no perfect resolution for the problems they faced, and any path they chose would lead them through hazardous terrain.

For her part, Rosa remained incredulous that Lars thought the Cacchiones ought to dump their precious stores of wine, but she shared his belief that it would be dangerous and imprudent to resume bootlegging. Rosa thought they should instead keep the old wine cellar well stocked with their best vintages, dumping wine under the cover of night only if it turned. They could make two hundred gallons of new wine each year, remaining within the legal limit, and as they emptied barrels taken from the old wine cellar, they could replace them with the new vintages stored in the winery. That way they would continue to replenish their hidden stores as older vintages failed, but an outside observer would never find more than the legally permitted
amount of wine in their main cellars. When Rosa suggested this to Giuditta, however, Lars pointed out that her plan depended upon the old wine cellar remaining a carefully guarded secret. If Crowell or another agent strolled merely a few paces beyond the yard, he would stumble upon the footpath that would lead straight to the old wine cellar. The Cacchiones were fortunate that it had escaped notice thus far, but Lars doubted their luck would hold. If and when the old wine cellar was discovered, it must hold no more than two hundred gallons of wine, or the Cacchiones would be undone.

The next morning, Giuditta waited for Lars and Rosa to arrive before announcing her decision. She intended to resume deliveries to San Francisco, selling as much wine as they could as quickly as possible, reserving only the finer vintages whose quality would improve rather than diminish with a few more years to age. As for the autumn crush, Giuditta would discuss their options with Dante the next time she visited him and defer her final decision until a few weeks before harvest. Considering how their shipment of wine grapes had been allowed to rot in a train car parked at the station the previous year, she was reluctant to rely too much upon those estimated profits and would prefer to make new wine.

Later, when Rosa and Lars could discuss matters privately, they discovered that they had both reached the same conclusion: They sympathized with the Cacchiones, but bootlegging obliged them to venture into the same circles as the police and the mob, the very people whose attention Rosa and Lars dared not draw. The longer they remained at Cacchione Vineyards, the more likely they were to cross paths with someone who could connect Nils and Rose Ottesen with Lars Jorgensen and Rosa Diaz Barclay.

Then, two days after Dominic and Vince resumed their deliveries to the city, a letter arrived at the vineyard addressed to Rosa Barclay in care of Giuditta Cacchione. When Giuditta showed it to her over their morning coffee, Rosa went cold. “That ‘E’ looks like an ‘A,’ but the name could be Rose,” Giuditta said, puzzling over the words scrawled on the outside of the envelope. Rosa did not recognize the block printing, but one glimpse of the Ventura County postmark sent shock and fear coursing through her veins. “But ‘Barclay’? Does this mean anything to you, Rose?”

“Barclay is my maiden name,” said Rosa faintly, taking the envelope and tucking it quickly into her pocket. It was all she could do to sip her coffee and discuss the day’s work with Giuditta, Francesca, and the others rather than bolting from the kitchen and tearing open the envelope where no one could observe her—or compulsively flinging it unread into the fire.

It was midmorning before she could slip away unnoticed to the barn, where she opened the envelope and found a newspaper clipping within. Even before she unfolded it she knew it would show the photo taken behind the Cacchione residence on the day of the raid.

Scrawled beneath the image in pencil, written with such force that the strokes sharply embossed the newsprint and almost tore it, were the words, “Damn you both to hell.”

John had not signed the note, but she recognized his handwriting, and even if she had not, no one else hated her and Lars enough to have sent that message.

Her stomach lurched. She staggered away from the barn, fell to her hands and knees, and vomited into the bunchgrass and yarrow. Head spinning, she sat down hard and fought to catch her breath. John had found them. He could not reach
them, but he knew where they were, and he could tell anyone—the police, his gangster friends, anyone.

She was not sure how long she sat there, dazed and reeling, before she heard someone shouting her name. She pushed herself to her feet, brushed dirt and grass from her dress, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and walked unsteadily around the barn. She found Giuditta and Francesca standing in the yard, shading their eyes with their hands and calling for her. Francesca saw her first and touched her mother’s arm, and then they hurried toward her. “Rose!” exclaimed Giuditta. “You’re as white as a sheet! Are you ill?”

The sun seemed unnaturally harsh and bright, the air still and stifling. “I—I’m not feeling well.”

“You should go home at once and lie down. Francesca, walk her back to the cabin.”

Francesca nodded, but Rosa gestured feebly toward the house. “I have to fetch the children—”

“They’ll be fine here until the end of the day,” Giuditta said firmly, studying her with concern, her brows drawn together over her dark eyes. “They’re all playing so nicely together and Mabel’s keeping an eye on everyone. Nils can bring them home when he’s done for the day. I’ll send him with a bit of supper so you don’t need to fix anything.”

Tears sprang into Rosa’s eyes. “You’re too kind.”

“Nonsense. I’m just the right amount of kind.” Giuditta smiled briefly and shooed Francesca forward. Francesca took Rosa’s arm, and Rosa, still dizzy, leaned on her as they walked slowly through the vineyard to the cabin, a blessedly cool sanctuary in the shade of the oak and walnut trees. How much longer would it remain their safe haven?

When Francesca left her at the cabin door, Rosa slipped inside
and lay down on the sofa that doubled as Lars’s bed. Her last thought before she sank into a restless doze halfway between sleeping and waking was that she wished she were bold enough to ask him to share her bed. What a comfort it would be to feel safe in his arms once again, to feel less alone, when night came and fear and worry enveloped her.

“Rosa?”

She opened her eyes to find the cabin dim and Lars kneeling beside the sofa, alone, gazing down at her with urgent concern. Distantly she heard the children shushing one another on the front porch.

“Rosa,” Lars said again, gently brushing a lock of dark hair out of her face. “Giuditta said you were ill. What’s wrong?”

She took a deep, shaky breath, sat up, and took the envelope from her pocket. He opened it warily, his face darkening as he read the scrawled curse, its every word sharp with hatred. “He’s still behind bars,” Lars said tightly, as he returned the clipping to the envelope and slipped it into his pocket. It was a relief to have it away from her, out of sight.

“But he knows where we are,” said Rosa.

“We’ll have to move on.”

Her heart sank, although she had reached the same unhappy, inevitable conclusion. “Where will we go?”

Lars shook his head, frowning. “I don’t know. We were planning to leave Cacchione Vineyards anyway. It’s too dangerous for us here.”

She nodded, drawing her knees up to her chest and gazing around the cabin, missing it already. “We’ve been happy here. I hate to leave.”

“Me too.” Lars hesitated. “Maybe we don’t have to go far,
just far enough to throw him off the trail, John and anyone he might send after us.”

She shuddered, imagining dark-suited men pursuing them, fedoras pulled low over their eyes, tommy guns held at the ready. “In other words, as far away as we can go, as fast and as soon as we can.”

He placed a hand on her leg as if he thought she might bolt from the sofa and start throwing clothing into suitcases. “Not necessarily, and we aren’t going to run off without a plan. We need to think this through.”

“We’ll need to think quickly,” she told him, as the door burst open and the children rushed in, breathless and sweetly concerned for Rosa’s health and hungry for the supper Giuditta had packed in the basket Marta carried.

More bad news awaited them when they arrived at the Cacchione residence the next morning. Several days earlier, Salvatore Vanelli, whom Rosa had met at the harvest dance and at several other gatherings at the Cacchione home, had suffered a heart attack while working in his vineyard. Although his condition was serious, he was recuperating at home and his doctor expected him to pull through.

“I wish I had known sooner,” fretted Giuditta as she packed an enormous basket with bread, fruit, preserves, hard cheese, and wine. “Bea and Sal weren’t blessed with children. They’re all alone on that remote place except for their foreman and the hired hands. Good people, all of them, but they aren’t family.” She regarded Rosa, Francesca, and Mabel with affectionate pride. “I’m off to see how I can help. I know I can trust you to look after things while I’m gone.”

“Of course, Ma,” said Francesca.

“Don’t worry about us,” said Mabel, holding out baby Sophia for a quick kiss. “We’ll tend the vineyards, we won’t sell any wine to anyone, we’ll fix lunch and supper for everyone, and we’ll be perfectly cordial to Mr. Crowell should he rear his ugly head.”

“Maybe not perfectly cordial,” Rosa amended. “I think we could manage to be coolly civil.”

“That’s good enough for me,” said Giuditta, hurrying off.

As soon as the door closed behind her, Francesca turned to Rosa. “And how are you feeling this morning?”

Aside from the lingering dread evoked by John’s note and the heartache of knowing that she must soon uproot her children and leave her new friends, she was fine. “Much better, thanks.”

Francesca and Mabel exchanged a quick glance. “Really?” asked Francesca. “Even this early in the morning?”