Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming (36 page)

Isabel left the cabin, but hesitated on the porch and returned to her old bedroom. One by one she took the liquor bottles from the crate and emptied them out the window. Someone had to prod Lars down the road to sobriety. Rosa waited at the end of it, but she could not wait forever.

Isabel returned to her horse and set off on the road to the mesa. Today might be the day Rosa came. She would make excuses for John, but Isabel would not pretend to believe them anymore for the sake of her daughter’s pride. Didn’t Rosa know that every scathing word John spoke to her burned Isabel’s ears as well? Didn’t she know that every blow that fell upon Rosa left bruises on her mother’s heart?

She waited at the edge of the canyon, breathing in the scent of wildflowers. Someday Rosa would come again, bringing the children, and Isabel would be waiting for them. She would not forsake her daughter a second time. Let weeks or months or years pass, Isabel would come to the mesa, undaunted, patient, awaiting the day her daughter would return to her.

Over the sound of the creek rushing through the canyon, Isabel heard a horse approaching. For a moment she was filled with joy and light, but the prayer of thanksgiving died on her lips at the sight of John Barclay crossing the mesa at a determined trot. His face was grim, his eyes dark with anger.

So. He knew where they met. Isabel had guessed as much the first day Rosa failed to appear.

She rose, brushed the grasses from her skirt, and faced him without fear. He would tell her Rosa was not coming, that she would never come. He would lie and say it was Rosa’s choice. He would call Isabel a fool, a pathetic old woman, for clinging so desperately to futile hopes.

As John approached, Isabel prepared herself for what was to come. Let him say what he would. She would ignore his poison words. Her love for her daughter was stronger than his hate.

She had failed Rosa once, but never again.

1925

L
ars returned home a few hours after the police took John Barclay into custody. Elizabeth, riding with Henry to the hospital in the back of the makeshift ambulance, saw none of this. Only later, after the surgeon removed the bullet from Henry’s shoulder and he had recovered enough for her to bring him home, did she learn that, upon hearing what had happened, Lars set the car upright and drove off toward the Barclay farm. The deputies searching the adobe for clues confirmed that Lars had spoken with them briefly, but left after determining Rosa and her children were not there.

That was the last time Lars Jorgensen was seen in the Arboles Valley.

Henry was still unconscious, recovering from surgery at the Oxnard General Hospital, when an investigator from the county came to take Elizabeth’s statement. She told them about John’s violent outburst and Rosa’s plan to seek shelter in the canyon.

The investigator looked up sharply from his notepad. “The Salto Canyon?”

He seemed so apprehensive that Elizabeth quickly assured him that Rosa knew the canyon well—so well that Elizabeth assumed she must have known of a cave or other shelter from the rain, or she would not have kept the children outside overnight. Rosa was probably awaiting word that it was safe to come out from hiding. “Lars Jorgensen should go,” she said. “Rosa trusts him.”

The investigator nodded and jotted some notes. He did not tell her that Lars was missing. He also did not mention that the Salto Creek had overflowed its banks that day, or that a flash flood had swept through the canyon with a force strong enough to uproot trees and tear boulders from the canyon walls. He didn’t want to upset her.

When the investigator finished with Elizabeth, he radioed the county sheriff. Two deputies found John Barclay’s team and wagon on the mesa where Elizabeth had told them to look. Later that week, a child’s rag doll was pulled from the mud two miles downstream of the canyon’s edge where Isabel Rodriguez Diaz had fallen to her death. Rosa and her four children were presumed drowned. Their bodies were never recovered.

In the course of searching the Barclay farm for evidence to explain John’s assault on the Jorgensen home, the police discovered two large crates buried in straw in the hayloft. Inside were a stash of small arms, a valise full of cash, and more than fifty gallons of contraband liquor in bottles that matched the one Lars Jorgensen had turned in to the Feds during the apricot harvest. They had been tracking Mob activity in southern California for years, but until Lars’s tip, they had lacked proof that the Mob had enlisted the services of local farmers in their illegal liquor and weapons activities. Thanks to Lars, they were on the track of some highly placed figures in organized crime, and hoped soon to be able to put some of them away for good.

Privately, the Feds agreed that they didn’t blame Lars for disappearing. He’d have to be a fool not to lie low for the rest of his life, now that he had made himself an enemy of the Mob. For all they knew, the Mob had already found him, and his bones were bleaching in the Mojave Desert.

John served two years in prison on federal racketeering charges. Carlos looked after his farm while he was away, although no one thought it was out of love for his brother-in-law. Carlos refused to believe that his sister, nieces, and nephew had drowned. Someday they would return and he would not allow their home to fall to ruin in the meantime. The post office moved to a small building next to the Arboles Grocery. Since no one else wanted the job, Carlos took over as postmaster.

Three weeks after John was released from prison, a hiker discovered his body at the bottom of Salto Canyon. The coroner concluded that he had jumped to his death. Rumors sped through the Arboles Valley like a brushfire in summer. Some people thought he had killed himself out of grief for the loss of his wife and children. Others 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 just couldn’t take it. 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. Older women in the valley, the friends of Isabel’s youth, knew such a thing was impossible but found a certain satisfaction in the tale.

The years passed. Carlos maintained the adobe and the outbuildings out of respect for his sister’s memory, but he allowed the native grasses and scrub to take over the fields. No farmer could ride past the old Barclay place without shaking his head and thinking that it was a shame to let so many fertile acres go to waste. Developers, eyeing the land hungrily, felt the same way. When Carlos would not accept any price for the farm, saying that it was not his to sell, they became determined to work around him. They cornered every government official with any possible influence over land issues and insisted the government should sell that abandoned farm near the canyon. It was a race pitting one developer against another to find someone in authority who would agree the city, state, or county owned the land and could make a deal. But the developers’ efforts proved futile. There was no mortgage on the land, so the developers could not anticipate a bank foreclosure. The property taxes were being paid regularly, so the government had no reason to interfere. If the developers wanted the land so badly, they should take the matter up with John and Rosa Barclay’s heirs.

The developers gave up in frustration. They had already approached Carlos and had been turned away. But they could wait. He obviously was not much of a farmer. He would change his mind someday when he finally realized his sister wasn’t coming back. Every man came upon hard times sooner or later, and someday he would be glad to have money in the bank.

1933

Elizabeth sat at the kitchen table in the cabin, counting out bills and change. At last she had enough money saved to buy back the Chimneys and Cornerstones quilt from Mrs. Diegel, but now that she did, she could not help thinking of other, more sensible uses for the money. There would be doctor bills when the baby came. Little Thomas outgrew clothes almost as quickly as she could sew them. Eleanor would need new shoes and school supplies in the fall. It seemed frivolous to spend so much on a quilt she did not truly need. She had pieced other quilts for the family, quilts that equaled the Chimneys and Cornerstones in beauty and warmth. As much as she longed for her quilt, she had managed to do without it for eight years. She could wait a few years more.

She sighed softly, bound the roll of bills with a rubber band, and returned the money to the coffee can. To think she had once teased Henry for refusing to put his money in a bank. His mistrust had spared them from losing everything after the stock market crashed and the banks failed. The Jorgensens had lost thousands, but the Nelsons had not lost a dime.

Henry looked up from his seat on the floor in front of the fireplace, where he and Thomas were engrossed in a game involving toy fire trucks and a wooden elephant. “Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind.”

“I can’t justify the expense,” she said. “As soon as I spend this money, a better use for it will appear. It always does.”

He couldn’t deny it. They both knew how many times through the years one emergency or another had forced them to nearly deplete their savings. Slowly they would build it up again, just in time for the next crisis. They managed to stay afloat, and in those troubled times they were grateful for that much, but they could never quite get ahead. Henry assured Elizabeth that better times were coming, and Elizabeth wanted to believe him, but she feared better times would not come soon enough. Not for them, and not for the migrant families who had abandoned Dust Bowl farms for the promise of work in the Arboles Valley. Almost daily, Oscar Jorgensen had to turn a carload of hungry, exhausted people away with nothing more than dried apricots to eat and milk for the children. Even during the apricot harvest, there were more workers than jobs on the farm.

“Go ahead and ransom your quilt,” said Henry. “You’ve waited long enough. Consider it an early birthday present.”

Elizabeth smiled, but said, “After all these years, it might be worn to tatters.”

“You can mend it.”

“Yes, but the money will still be gone. Times are hard. We don’t know how much longer the Jorgensens will be able to keep you on.” They had already been forced to let Elizabeth go, but except for the loss of wages and Mary Katherine’s daily company, she did not mind. She was content to tend her own garden, keep her own house, and care for her children.

Henry grinned. “Oscar would never fire me and you know it.”

Of course she knew it. Henry had taken over Lars’s responsibilities upon his disappearance nearly eight years before. Elizabeth could not imagine how the Jorgensens would manage without Henry. His job was as secure as any job could be.

“If the quilt is worn out,” she said, “maybe I can talk Mrs. Diegel into setting a lower price.”

“That’s the spirit.” Henry came to her and kissed her on both cheeks. “So beautiful and yet so shrewd.”

The next afternoon, Annalise agreed to babysit the children while Elizabeth went into town. First she stopped by the post office to send a letter to her parents and collect the mail. Cousin Sylvia had sent her a postcard from the World’s Fair in Chicago, where she had apparently spent most of her time at the Sears exhibition hall admiring the winners of a national quilt contest. She and her sister had collaborated on an entry, but they had been eliminated at the regional level, not a bad showing for two teenage girls. “My mother would have loved this show,” Sylvia had written. “If she were still with us, and if she had entered one of her quilts, she would have won first place.”

Sylvia’s wistful note decided the matter for Elizabeth. Her beloved aunt Eleanor was gone. So was Grandma Bergstrom. The quilts the Bergstrom women made were becoming increasingly rare and precious with each passing year. Extravagance or not, she wanted her quilt back.

“Carlos,” she asked, “do you have any advice for someone on her way to haggle with Mrs. Diegel over the price of a used quilt?”

“Remind her that the quilt has lost value since you sold it to her, new,” Carlos said dryly. He had resigned as the handyman of the Grand Union Hotel to become the full-time postmaster after the post office expanded to accommodate the growing population of the Arboles Valley. “Mention the limited market for used quilts. She catered to those developer types for so many years, that’s language she’ll understand.” He hesitated, struggling with conflicting loyalties. “I don’t think you’ll have much trouble getting her to lower her price. She…could use the money.”

Elizabeth thanked him and continued on to the Grand Union Hotel. She had not visited in several years, not since Henry treated her to supper in the dining room to celebrate their fifth anniversary. She had heard that the hotel had fallen on hard times after Mrs. Diegel’s favorite developers went bankrupt after the stock market crash, but she was still startled to find peeling paint on the eaves and weeds overtaking the once meticulously kept front garden. Inside, the lobby was as neat and tidy as ever, the bar even more crowded with imbibers than in more prosperous days. Elizabeth could guess how Mrs. Diegel had managed to eke out a living after overnight guests became scarce. She only hoped that for her sake, Mrs. Diegel kept her own still and had not become involved with what might euphemistically be described as an outside supplier. Elizabeth knew all too well what happened to people who became tangled up with that lot.

She found Mrs. Diegel in the kitchen stirring a pot of chicken stew. The cook was nowhere to be seen, but a girl a few years older than Annalise stood at the sideboard peeling apples for pie. Mrs. Diegel greeted Elizabeth like an old friend and offered her a glass of lemonade. Elizabeth gladly accepted and pulled up a stool so they could talk while Mrs. Diegel worked.

“Did you hear the big news?” Mrs. Diegel asked before Elizabeth could bring up the quilt. “Hoot Gibson is coming to the Arboles Valley to shoot a new picture. It’s called
Raging Gulch.
They’re going to film most of the outdoor scenes on the mesa and in the Salto Canyon.”

“Is that so?”

Mrs. Diegel’s sharp gaze did not miss a thing. “Now, I know you lost a friend in that canyon, but you can’t hold that against Hoot Gibson. The canyon is a great setting for a movie. It might even bring more tourists back to the valley.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“That’s not the best part. They’ve decided to use the Grand Union for many of the indoor scenes. Lucky for me, they chose this place based upon some old photographs George Hanneman has hanging on the wall in his office at Safari World. If they had gone to the trouble to see it for themselves, they might have chosen the Conejo Lodge instead.” She shook her head and frowned. “I have to spruce this place up before the production crew arrives next month, but where I’m going to find the money to buy paint or hire a painter, I have no idea.”