Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (42 page)

“Not before I salvage what I can,” said Lars cheerfully, and he set out for the orchard.

Rosa admired the sign a while longer, then kissed the children and left them to their play while she went into the kitchen to start supper. She was peeling potatoes and humming contently to herself when Lars appeared, his expression stunned and disbelieving.

“What is it?” asked Rosa, alarmed.

“I think…” Lars hesitated and tried again. “I think I might know why Sal was feeling so much strain. I think I know why he had that heart attack.”

“Tell me.”

“I think I’d better show you.”

Quickly she snatched off her apron and took his hand, and together they hurried off through the vineyard to the orchard, not slowing their pace until Lars brought them to the old prune barn. There, at the edge of the orchard farthest from the house, he halted.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Rosa. “Is the roof caving in?
Did something fall and strike you? We can have this deathtrap torn down tomorrow if it’s too—”

Shaking his head, Lars opened the door and gestured for her to take a look inside.

Within the dilapidated old barn, Rosa discovered a gleaming expanse of copper boilers, rubber tubing, and tin milk jugs; sacks of sugar; charcoal left from burning; and inexplicably, large wooden crates marked on the sides with painted loaves of bread and biscuits and cakes and the words, “Johnson’s Bakery.” A heavy, sweet, yeasty smell hung in the air.

Rosa had never seen a still except in newspaper photos printed alongside descriptions of intrepid federal agents’ raids on hapless moonshiners, but she immediately recognized the contraption for what it was. It was a still, and it was enormous and elaborate and very much illegal, and it was in their prune barn, and there was not a speck of dust upon it.

R
osa stared at the still, incredulous, unwilling to believe that the Vanellis had sold them their estate without mentioning the illegal contraption hidden within their old prune barn. “Do you think it’s possible that Sal and Bea didn’t know this was here?” Rosa tried to remember Bea’s exact words, but all she recalled was that Bea had said—or perhaps she had only implied—that they never entered the crumbling structure.

Lars studied the still, dubious. “I guess it’s possible, but I doubt it.”

“Maybe someone else built it—one of the hired hands or someone.”

“Without the Vanellis or anyone else finding out?”

The only way to know would be to ask. They sought out Daniel first, and when they realized he was in the wine cellar, Lars told Rosa he would wait outside while she went in to question him. He had vowed never to set foot in the winery, and he meant to keep that vow.

“But there isn’t any wine there now,” said Rosa. “The Vanellis
took what was left of last year’s two hundred gallons with them, and Daniel’s new wine is too young to drink. It’s only unfermented grape juice. Wouldn’t it be fine, just this once?”

“Rosa,” said Lars, pained, “the worst thing an alcoholic can do is start convincing himself that just this once, it would be fine.”

Rosa bit her lips shut and nodded, ashamed that she had even suggested it.

She went inside and found Daniel in the cave inspecting the wooden troughs of new wine he had recently crushed. Rosa had worked alongside him all the while, scrubbing the winery clean, sorting the grapes, removing the stems and leaves, and crushing the berries. Later they would press the juice, and Daniel planned to teach her how different oak barrels with different toasts added notes and flavors to the wine, making each vintage unique. He had shared his knowledge generously, openly, and as they worked together, his cool demeanor had thawed. Rosa hoped she was not about to make it ice over again.

“Daniel,” she said after he greeted her cheerfully, “did you know there’s an enormous still in the old prune barn?”

His smile promptly vanished. “I knew about it,” he said guardedly. “I’ve never seen it.”

“Did Sal build it, or one of the hired hands?”

Daniel grimaced. “I make it a point to mind my own business.”

“Please, Daniel, tell me. If it was the Vanellis’, it belongs to me and Nils now, and that makes me very nervous.”

“It wasn’t the Vanellis’, and it doesn’t belong to any of the hands, either,” Daniel said. “For the past few years, some gangsters out of San Francisco have been renting the prune barn to make grappa. The deal is five hundred dollars a month, no
questions asked. Sal couldn’t turn down that kind of money, not in these hard times.”

“No, I suppose he couldn’t.” Rosa leaned against a wine barrel and took a deep, shaky breath. “And since the Vanellis switched almost entirely to table grapes years ago, and don’t have any old wine in storage, and have never sold wine grapes, Prohibition agents wouldn’t suspect them of bootlegging. They probably don’t bother coming around often to inspect.”

“Strictly speaking…” Daniel seemed almost embarrassed to say it. “The Vanellis weren’t bootlegging. They were just renting out an unused prune barn.”

Rosa could well imagine how Dwight Crowell would regard that fine distinction. “How often do these gentlemen come around to make grappa?”

“About once or twice a month.”

“Then they’re overdue.” Rosa paced the width of the cave, clasping her hands, working the sudden cold out of her fingers. “Maybe the Vanellis told them they had sold the estate and that they shouldn’t return.”

“Maybe,” said Daniel, but he looked doubtful. “Would they have left the still behind? It must be worth something.”

The equipment was valuable, even if only for the price of the parts. On the other hand, it was illegal, and if the gangsters didn’t have another place to hide such unwieldy incriminating evidence, they might have thought it more prudent to abandon it.

Her head ached, and she clasped a hand to her brow and fought to untangle her snarled thoughts. She felt a sharp, unmistakable surge of anger for Sal and Bea. They had seemed so kind, so generous, so weary and thankful to have the vineyard and orchard taken off their hands. Now she understood why
they were so eager to sell the estate and be done with it, so eager that until Rosa and Lars had come along, they had been willing to accept less than half their asking price. And now the burden was Rosa and Lars’s to bear, and if Dwight Crowell came snooping around—

“Why didn’t they tell us?” she said, thinking aloud. “Why didn’t they warn us?”

“Would you have paid as much as you did if you had known what you were taking on?”

With a sudden flash of insight, Rosa said, “You made the other offer, the one they almost accepted.”

Daniel nodded.

“Did you offer them so little because you knew their secret?”

“I wasn’t trying to lowball them. I offered them every cent to my name,” he replied. “I’ve worked these acres all my life. Can you blame me for wanting to own them?”

“No.” Rosa understood all too well what he felt. “I don’t blame you at all. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. You wanted the land too, and you could afford it.”

Silence descended upon them, as cool and deep as the wine cellar itself, but eventually Daniel spoke. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” said Rosa. “What would you have done, if the Vanellis had accepted your offer?”

“I’d have collected the monthly rent, looked the other way, and kept my mouth shut.”

He answered so promptly that Rosa knew he had decided long before he offered to buy the estate. And if, after he assumed ownership of the estate, the feds had discovered the still on his property, he could have claimed that he had known nothing
about it, that he had merely honored a rental contract established by the previous owners. Rosa and Lars could attempt that tactic too, but they were less likely to succeed. Unlike them, Daniel had not made an enemy of Dwight Crowell. He was well known within the community and his people had been in Sonoma County for generations. Not so the Ottesens, for whom no record of their existence before their arrival in San Francisco a year ago could be found.

What if the gangsters were as curious as Crowell about their new landlords? What would they learn from their associates in Southern California?

Shaken, Rosa thanked Daniel for his honesty and went back outside to Lars, who was pacing in the yard. When Rosa told him all she had learned, it seemed as if every word etched new lines of worry on his brow.

“We have to report this to the authorities,” Lars said when she finished. “We can claim—with perfect honesty, I might add—that we recently bought the property and only just now discovered the still. It’s not ours and they’re welcome to haul it away.”

“We could do that, but as soon as they’ve finished destroying the still, they’ll drive up to Cloverdale and arrest the Vanellis.”

Lars frowned, kicking at the dirt. He didn’t want to see Bea and Sal prosecuted any more than she did, even though the couple had deceived them.

“Eventually whoever’s been running that still will come around to make another batch of grappa,” said Rosa. “How would we explain to them that we got rid of it?”

Lars abruptly stopped pacing. “We can’t make enemies of those people.”

Rosa laughed, tearfully, helplessly, from the futility of it all. “I know, but what can we do?”

“For now, let’s do nothing,” said Lars. “Until a few hours ago we didn’t know that contraption existed. If I hadn’t gone to the prune barn today, we still wouldn’t know.”

Rosa wished they didn’t.

One rainy morning in late October, Rosa and Daniel were in the winery carrying out a task Daniel called “punching down the cap.” As the juice fermented, grape skins, stems, and seeds floated to the top of the wooden vats and formed a solid skin, trapping in heat as well as some of the active yeasts needed to transform the sugar into alcohol. Three times a day over the course of several weeks, Daniel and Rosa broke up the caps and pushed them back down into the dark juice with a tool that reminded her of an oversized potato masher. Daniel assured her the procedure was essential in keeping the fermentation process going, that it would prevent the growth of mold and add color, richness, and tannins to the wine. When the cap no longer floated to the surface, he told her, it would be time to press the wine.

They were nearly finished when one of the hands called down the cellar stairs that a man from Johnson’s Bakery had arrived and wanted to speak to the new proprietor. When Daniel shot her a quick, wary look, Rosa remembered the wooden crates she had seen in the prune barn and her heart plummeted. The moment she had dreaded had come, and Lars was off at the Cacchione estate advising Giuditta how to prepare the young, struggling apricot orchard for the winter. Rosa was on her own.

“I can finish here,” Daniel said, grimacing in sympathy. “Or I could come with you, if you want.”

“I think I’d better see him alone.” If she didn’t, he might guess how nervous she was, and she didn’t want to give him that advantage. Rosa stripped off her gloves, summoned up her courage, and ascended the cellar stairs. Outside, the rain had diminished to a fine mist that clung to her hair and cheeks, and as the sun fought to burn through the clouds, she spotted a delivery van parked in the yard, its doors and sides adorned with the same logo she had seen on the wooden crates in the prune barn. A dark-haired man in a snappy pinstriped suit and hat strolled through the shade gardens with his hands in his pockets, admiring the late-blooming undergrowth, but he looked up at the sound of Rosa’s approach. Barely keeping the tremor from her voice, she introduced herself and asked how she could help him.

“I’m Alberto Lucerno from Johnson’s Bakery,” he said, shaking her hand. He looked to be close to her own age, perhaps a few years older, with short, dark hair oiled and parted down the middle. “Perhaps the previous owners mentioned me?”

“I’m afraid they didn’t.” If only they had…“I—I usually make my own bread. Perhaps they thought I wouldn’t need your services.”

“We do much more than bake bread.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I hope you’re as willing to do business with us as the folks who used to live here were,” said Mr. Lucerno earnestly. If she didn’t know better, she could almost believe him to be a salesman hoping to win a new client for his bakery—except no one wore a suit that fine to deliver bread and rolls and pastries.

“We’ll see,” said Rosa, glancing up at the sky as thunder rumbled. “Would you like a cup of coffee and a piece of pie while we talk things over?”

He readily agreed, and as heavy drops began to pelt the ground, he quickly followed her inside to the parlor, where she served him a generous slice of prune pie and poured them each a cup of coffee. He accepted cream and sugar and didn’t seem terribly disappointed to learn that the man of the house was not around. “I wasn’t aware the vineyard was for sale,” he said. “Seems the Vanellis moved out kind of sudden.”

“Well, under the circumstances, it seemed best.” Rosa took a sip of coffee, wondering if her guest had ever killed anyone. “Perhaps you haven’t heard about Mr. Vanelli’s heart attack?”