Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (44 page)

The children rarely spoke of John anymore. Even Lupita had come to accept Lars as part of their family, although when she was especially angry with her parents she would stomp her foot and yell that someday her real papa would come for her. As infrequent as Lupita’s outbursts were, they left Rosa badly shaken. John haunted her nightmares, and the thought of him suddenly appearing on the front porch demanding his children and the now empty valises that had once been stuffed with cash was enough to make her heart pound with fright. More anonymous letters had followed the first John had sent to Rosa Barclay in care of Cacchione Vineyards. When the second arrived, Giuditta kept it for Rosa until the next time they saw each other, hesitating before she held up the envelope so Rosa could see the postmark and the same block printing. Giuditta offered to write, “Return to sender, addressee unknown” across the front and
put it with her outgoing mail, unopened. Rosa agreed and asked Giuditta to do the same with any others that might come. Perhaps it would have been better to destroy them, not knowing what incriminating secrets to her past they might contain, but keeping them would prove that she had received them, whereas returning them might convince John that she had moved away. Rosa didn’t know how many letters Giuditta had received and returned, but she hoped they were few and far between and that eventually John would give up and stop sending them.

Rosa could not help but think of John and the mobsters he had become entangled with every time she spotted the Johnson’s Bakery truck parked out by the edge of the orchard or heard the distant, low hum of the still as she walked through the vineyard. Mr. Lucerno’s associates apparently had a lot of work to catch up on in the prune barn after their prolonged absence, for they appeared far more often than Rosa had anticipated. Although she glimpsed the men only rarely, and only at a distance through the prune trees, signs of their presence were everywhere for those who knew how to interpret them—tire tracks in the gravel, footprints in the dirt outside the crumbling prune barn, a faint sweet and yeasty smell that wafted through the orchard when the wind came from the west, and of course, the delivery truck. By the time Mr. Lucerno returned on the first of November to pay the rent, Rosa’s nerves were a tangle of apprehension and worry. Dwight Crowell came by for routine inspections at least once a week, and so far no more of his visits had coincided with those of the men from Johnson’s Bakery, but Rosa knew it was only a matter of time until the two factions collided.

Worry kept her from drifting off to sleep at night even within the safe circle of Lars’s arms, and nightmares shook her
awake before dawn. Dark circles formed beneath her eyes and her stomach rebelled, leaving her ravenous one moment and queasy the next. But despite her distress, when she wasn’t brooding over John, Crowell, or the ersatz bakers cooking grappa in the prune barn, she was content and industrious, grateful for her children’s good health and affection and for Lars’s love. She did not need to pretend to be happy, as she had living in the adobe with John; she
was
happy. But she was also very worried, knowing that their new lives in their beautiful new home on the Sonoma Rose Vineyards and Orchard could be snatched away from them at any moment, and though she tried, she could not hide the physical manifestation of her distress.

One morning in mid-November, she made corn cakes for Ana and Miguel’s breakfast and flapjacks for everyone else. She served the rest of the family, placed two steaming flapjacks on her own plate, and was just about to ask Marta to pass the syrup when Ana exclaimed, “Mamá, don’t eat those!”

Rosa was so startled she almost spilled her coffee. “Don’t eat what? What’s the matter?”

“Don’t eat flapjacks.” Ana’s brow was furrowed, her dark eyes troubled and full of fear. “You should have corn cakes instead.”

Rosa’s stomach was so unsettled that morning that she would prefer not to eat anything. “Why,
mija
?”

“Because—” Ana’s eyes darted to Miguel and Lupita, as if they were too young to hear.

Lars set down his fork and studied Ana, concerned. “Go on, honey. What is it?”

“Because you’re like us,” Ana blurted. “You can’t have flour anymore, Mamá. It makes you sick too, just like me and Miguel.”

“Mamá’s sick?” asked Lupita, her voice rising with alarm.

“Of course not,” Rosa soothed, reaching across the table to clasp Lupita’s hand. “I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not,” insisted Ana. “I’ve seen you throwing up. You’ve caught what we have.”

Rosa muffled a sigh. “No, I didn’t,
mija
. I’m just tired, that’s all. I’ve been working too hard.”

Marta looked bewildered. “Ana, Mamá can’t catch what you and Miguel have. You got it from your father.” In recent months she had begun referring to John in that aloof manner, as if she had not considered him her father too for most of her life. “It’s not like the measles.”

“How do you know?” countered Ana tearfully. “Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but I have. Every morning Mamá nibbles some toast or a flapjack, and then later, in the middle of washing the dishes, she runs away and throws up. I know you do, Mamá. I heard you through the door.”

“Rosa,” Lars broke in, “is this true? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I—” Was she really ill that often? She was so busy, so preoccupied with the children and the vineyard and the winery and their frequent, unexpected, and unwelcome visitors that she had not given much thought to her upset stomach except to lump it in with the other effects of her ongoing worries.

“Ana,” said Marta reasonably, “last night Mama had bread with supper, remember? She didn’t throw up then, did she?”

Ana thought for a moment. “I didn’t hear her, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t. She’s definitely sick every morning. Maybe she throws up at night after we go to bed.”

Lupita set down her fork, looking faintly ill herself. “Can we please not talk so much about throwing up?”

“That’s an excellent idea,” declared Rosa. “Ana,
mija
, I don’t have celiac disease, but if it would make you feel better, this morning I’ll have corn cakes instead of flapjacks for my breakfast. Okay?”

Ana nodded, relieved, and soon everyone resumed eating and the children’s cheerful patter turned to other things. Rosa replaced her untouched flapjacks on the serving platter and took a corn cake instead, and as she raised her fork to take a bite, her eyes met Lars’s across the table. Wide-eyed and startled, he raised his eyebrows in a silent question. She gave him a small, uncertain shrug and smiled weakly.

Lars insisted that she see a doctor that very day. She preferred Dr. Reynolds, but Lars was too agitated to wait for her to make the trip into San Francisco, and he didn’t want her to travel alone on the train in her condition. “We don’t know that I have a condition,” she reminded him, although now that she was paying attention, she was fairly sure she did.

Giuditta and Alegra recommended the same doctor in Santa Rosa, and he confirmed what Ana had unwittingly noticed and Lars and Rosa had suspected. Rosa was pregnant.

Shock soon gave way to joy and worry and concern in equal measure. Rosa had never expected to have another child, and although she had suffered no unusual complications in her previous pregnancies, she was thirty-six and knew there were risks at her age. She worried how the demands of a new baby would disrupt her other children’s lives, just as they were settling into a comfortable routine after the series of upheavals they had endured throughout the previous year. Never far from her thoughts was the fear that John or the police or the gangsters they had left behind in Southern California might find them and force them to flee in the night in peril of their lives—but how
fast and how far could she run with a child in her womb or a newborn in her arms? And with Dwight Crowell determined to uncover all their secrets and Albert Lucerno directing an intermittent stream of gangsters past their front door, how long could they expect to keep their identities secret?

For Lars, however, Rosa’s pregnancy brought only happiness. Although he did not dismiss Rosa’s fears, his joy outshone any worries. They were going to have a baby, and this time they would raise the child together from the very first, within the safe circle of a loving family.

“Safe,” echoed Rosa. Yes, this baby and all their children must be safe. Every other consideration diminished in comparison.

Before their child arrived in July, Rosa would take every possible precaution to ensure the safety of all their children.

She counted off the worst threats confronting them: John was the first and foremost, but he would remain in prison for at least a few more years. He knew where Rosa, Lars, and the children had been, but not where they were now. If, upon his release, he made his way to Santa Rosa, Giuditta would set him upon a false trail, and they could enlist other trusted friends to confirm whatever story Giuditta told him. Rosa knew, too, that it would not be easy for John to make the journey north, a felon with limited resources and no friends. He could not deplete their bank accounts or sell the ranch to finance a search for the wife and children everyone else believed to be dead, not when Rosa held all the necessary documents within the strongbox she had taken from the adobe. As a precaution, Rosa and Lars passed themselves off as John and Rosa Barclay and met with a banker in San Francisco. They explained that they had recently relocated to the city and wanted to transfer their funds from
their old bank in the Arboles Valley to a new account with his bank. The clerk was all too happy to help, not knowing that two weeks later they would, with the assistance of a different clerk, close their new account and deposit the money into Nils and Rose Ottesen’s account with the Bank of Sonoma.

Dwight Crowell persisted as a frequent intrusion into their lives. Although Rosa had once dismissed him as a nuisance, as his questions became more probing and his demeanor more malicious, she had come to see him as a menace. Under the law he could show up unannounced to inspect the winery, a right he exploited at whim. Complaining to his superiors would do them no good, as Paulo and Alegra Del Bene had learned. All Rosa and Lars could do to shield themselves from his authority was to tolerate his visits and give him no cause to arrest them—which they could have done quite easily, if not for their aliases and their unwilling association with known criminals.

They could do little more to conceal their true identities from Crowell than what they had already done, but their ties to organized crime had to be severed before it was too late.

They could not simply ask Albert Lucerno to leave, and they could not afford to offend him by demanding that he go. Lars and Rosa talked endlessly about what to do, but for every solution one of them proposed, the other found a fatal flaw. When Mr. Lucerno came by the house to pay the December rent, Rosa warned him, over coffee and a slice of pumpkin pie, that Dwight Crowell had taken to prowling the winery and the vineyard and she worried that it was only a matter of time before he found his way to the prune barn. Unconcerned, Mr. Lucerno assured her that the men he worked for would help pay the Ottesens’ legal expenses if they were caught holding the bag. Rosa smiled tightly and thanked him.

Christmas offered them a merry diversion from their troubles, but as Rosa prepared the nursery and felt the first stirrings of the child within her womb, the strain of harboring bootleggers and dodging the law left her constantly exhausted and apprehensive, as if she were caught in a vise, fighting to hold the jaws open while an unseen adversary mercilessly turned the screw. In early January, Rose reluctantly accepted the rent and told Mr. Lucerno that she lived in deathly fear that the decrepit old barn would collapse upon his men while they worked. Without pausing to reflect, Mr. Lucerno remarked that his men were deceptively light on their feet and would probably escape uninjured at the first sign of trouble, and that he was more concerned about the loss of the grappa and damage to the equipment. His merciless indifference chilled her. She realized then that his apparent concern for her with regard to Dwight Crowell had misled her. She would not find a way to appeal to his better nature or sense of decency because he possessed neither.

Increasingly desperate and afraid, she despaired of finding a way to free her family from the vise grip that inched ever tighter. Then one night, a sudden and unexpected thunderstorm brought the children running from their own beds into hers and Lars’s. As she sang the children gentle lullabies to calm their fears so they could drift back off to sleep, she prayed for the storm to increase its fury, to bring gale-force winds down from Sonoma Mountain, leveling the prune barn and destroying everything within it. How, she wondered angrily, could it withstand storm after storm? Why would it not simply collapse under the weight of old age and rot? She had warned Mr. Lucerno that the neglected building was a deathtrap, but as if it had a perverse will of its own and wanted to prove her a liar, it refused to fall.

Perhaps, she suddenly realized, she and Lars needed to give it a push.

While the rest of her family slept, she lay awake for hours, jittery and eager, until the rain ceased and the winds diminished. Careful not to jostle the children, she shook Lars awake, pressed a finger to her lips as he yawned and blinked up at her, and gestured to the door. Carefully they extricated themselves from the tangle of sheets, blankets, and sleeping children and stole quietly into the hallway. “I know what to do,” Rosa whispered. “We have to burn down the prune barn.”

“What?”

“We have to do it now,” Rose insisted, grasping his arm. “We can blame it on a lightning strike from the storm. If we wait, we’ll miss our chance.”

Lars inhaled deeply, but thankfully he did not need long to make up his mind. “Get dressed. The grappa will burn but I’ll fetch some kerosene too in case we need to speed things along.”

Swift and silent, they threw on their clothes and hurried out into the fog-shrouded stillness between the storm and the sunrise. The muddy yard was cratered with puddles and strewn with windfall leaves and broken twigs. Rosa went on ahead through the vineyard while Lars stopped at the garage for kerosene. Would the rain-soaked wood burn? Rosa wondered as she strode through the grapevines, stripped of their summer greenery, stark and angular in the predawn haze. The prune barn had to come down that morning. There would not be many occasions when a thunderstorm coincided with the men’s absence. It had to come down now, because Rosa could not endure the strain much longer.