Judith Krantz (66 page)

“Here, on the first page, is the petition, dated 1851. It’s from Don Antonio Pablo Valencia, a native-born citizen of California to the Land Commission of
the United States. He’s asking the commission to confirm the Mexican land grant that was made in 1839. He informs them that he’s the sole legitimate son of Don Bernardo Valencia. Don Bernardo, his father, was also an only son. His father—the first Valencia in California—was Teodosio Maria Valencia and it was Teodosio who received the original Spanish land grant in 1788—apparently he had retired from the company of the Presidio of San Diego and received the land from the Spanish governor, Pedro Fages, for his honorable services to the Crown of Spain.”

Bill Frank looked up at Jazz. “That’s an unusually straight line of inheritance for that period—the Valencias didn’t run to multiple sons, did they? That explains why they didn’t have to divide up the land. Now let’s see what else this says. Apparently Teodosio, the former soldier, lived on the rancho until his death in 1816 at the age of seventy-three. He built a large adobe house, stocked the land with cattle, about twenty-five hundred head, and two herds of horses as well as much other livestock—the details are all here, down to the last unbroken mule. He also planted vineyards and orchards, properly fenced in wood. Don Antonio claims that his father, Don Bernardo, improved the house and built other buildings as well—a school, a buttery, a tannery and so forth.
Hmmm—
this is interesting. Don Bernardo seems to have been a highly successful man, he employed a large number of people, including a schoolmaster, a wine-maker, trained carpenters, gardeners … it goes on and on—a big establishment—and he faithfully maintained the herds and oversaw the fruitful cultivation of the land—”

Bill Frank read to himself, quickly, and put down the petition. “These are far more extensive and elaborate claims than most, but basically they’re similar to claims made in all petitions, except for the fact that they go back so clearly to the original Spanish grant.”

“Oh, keep reading!” Jazz begged fervently, luminescent with expectation. Bill Frank set the map to one side. As quickly as possible he skimmed the remaining
pages. “All of this is the normal testimony from solid citizens of the region, establishing the fact that the Valencias had occupied the Rancho Montana de la Luna as long as they or their fathers or grandfathers could remember.”

Jazz’s head slumped forward, her vision blurred by this final deception. Afraid that a tear might fall on the map, she moved it from its place on the desk.

“I’ll take one more look at the map, if you don’t mind,” Bill Frank said. “There’s something unusual about the writing down here at the bottom. Probably it’s a more detailed description of the boundaries, the ‘Metes and Bounds’ as we call them, although it appears to be far longer than any I’ve seen before.”

He studied the old map for several minutes. “Hmm. Well … here’s an addition to the map unlike anything I’ve ever run across before. Just listen to this:

Bill Frank looked up with a huge grin. “The signature is that of Bernardo Valencia and it’s dated January 9, 1820. The Franciscans were still in power then. If this can’t be called a private land agreement I don’t know what could be. The entire
expediente
of which this map is a part, was accepted and approved by the Gwin Commission and a copy of the final grant to Don Antonio Valencia, Don Bernardo’s son, is right here on this last page, signed and sealed by both the recorder of the General Land Office and by the then President of the United States, Millard Fillmore, in 1853.”

“The promise of the mountain,” Jazz whispered in awe.

“I think you could properly call it a covenant,” Casey said quietly.

“ ‘Three rocks,’ ” Jazz gasped, “ ‘three rocks,’ wouldn’t you have thought Bernardo could have been more specific?” She sat down abruptly on a large stone, streaming with sweat, afraid that she might never get up again.

“It must have seemed enough at the time,” Casey responded, trying to catch his breath. “Anyway they’re ‘sentinel’ rocks, not just ‘rock’ rocks.”

“Oh, Casey, ‘rocks are rocks, trees are trees,
shoot it in Griffith Park’—what movie producer said that?”

“Either Spielberg or Lucas, I’m not sure exactly.”

Jazz fought to hold tight to the leaping impression of certainty that she had felt in the Huntington Library, when it seemed that the last piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. For it had not been the last piece in the puzzle, but, as Bill Frank had pointed out in his precise vocabulary, the ‘penultimate piece,’ for unless they found the Place of the Three Sentinel Rocks, they would have no way of knowing what part of the ranch the covenant covered.

Portola Peak resisted climbing. Now, Jazz thought, as she used a damp bandana as a towel, now she knew exactly why the family mountain had never been a picnic site for the Kilkullen family, why a jug of wine or a shaker of martinis wasn’t occasionally carried up at sundown to be enjoyed with the view. The mountain that looked so deceptively climbable from the hacienda was, on close inspection, an ideal location for a perfectly hideous Outward Bound experience, the kind of experience she had avoided scrupulously ever since her photojournalist days.

Jazz and Casey had left on horseback while the morning air was still chill. Jazz, on a last-minute impulse, had gone to the archive room and supplied them with two of the sturdy walking sticks that Hugh Kilkullen had collected, which were still kept in an umbrella stand by the door. Susie had provided a package of sandwiches and a flask of water, and Jazz had taken a camera in a bag she strapped around her waist. What they had really needed, she realized in retrospect, was an armored tank, or at least a couple of machetes, but it was too late to mention this to Casey.

It must be well over two hours since they had been forced to tie their horses to a small tree and take to their feet. Above the highest upland pastures of the ranch, the lower slopes of Portola Peak rose steeply until the spur of the mountain itself was reached. It
was there that the vicious underbrush, a combination of prickly pear, mesquite and chaparral, became too tangled and dangerous for the horses.

Ah, but human beings, Jazz thought, as she blinked the sweat out of her eyes, could go where horses could not. Man could spelunk and spend months in wet, dark, nasty caves under the surface of the earth, hanging out with stalactites and stalagmites; man could snorkel and frisk and flirt with stinging jellyfish and hungry octopi; man could reach the North and South Poles and talk to the animals, and man could get to the moon and schlepp around, turning somersaults and planting flags; so it stood to reason that this man and this woman, protected by the denim they wore, could most certainly claw their way up through this fiendish mass, using the walking sticks, held in front of them in both hands, to bend the underbrush back far enough so that they could force a passage.

When they’d started out, it seemed obvious that there was only one direction to take, for the spur of the mountain was so narrow that it was the only way up. But as they climbed, the spur grew wider and wider until the mountain offered vistas of a wilderness of dry, sage-scented, bloodthirsty brush rising in every direction, brush that deceptively masked the brutal steepness of the pitch of the land over which they had been struggling.

“If you were a Franciscan friar, which way would you go?” Jazz asked Casey.

“If I were a Franciscan friar, I’d be wearing a long robe and sandals and I wouldn’t be here, no how, no way, my lady.”

“It’s nice that you can stay optimistic in the face of adversity,” Jazz observed.

“Oh, I’m optimistic. Those Sentinel Rocks are here somewhere. I’m merely glad we’re wearing boots.”

“Rattlesnakes?” Jazz asked. She could face mountain lions, but rattlesnakes?

“Rattlesnakes and tarantulas. But they can’t bite
through leather. Also coyote, quail and some very unfriendly cacti.”

“I keep looking for something like a trail, a path worn by pilgrim feet,” Jazz said plaintively. “Anyone would think we were the first people to climb Portola.”

“We know for sure that Teodosio and six friars climbed it in 1806, but since then? This is not exactly what’s known as a walk in the park.”

“Ah, come on, Casey, they must have made other pilgrimages up here. And I remember that when I was a kid, my father told me that his grandfather, old Hugh, had climbed Portola … maybe a hundred years ago, now that I think of it. You’re right, that wouldn’t leave much of a trail.”

“Still …” Casey wearily tapped something lying on the ground with his walking stick. “Look at this … clear evidence of recent civilized visitation.”

“It can’t be,” Jazz said slowly as she focused on the can of Diet Pepsi that lay, all but concealed from view, under a layer of dirt. “It just
cannot
be.”

“I didn’t bring it up with me.”

“But who …?”

“It could only have been someone who strayed from the regular hiking trails. After all, we’re surrounded by national parks. Believe me, whoever left it behind strayed down, not up.”

“I’ve got to get a shot of that. Larry Bush will never believe this.”

“Who’s he?”

“One of my friends at Pepsi—public-relations chief.” Jazz got down very low, brushed some of the dirt off the can and took several shots of the Pepsi can lying in the foreground, with the majestic view of the dominion of ranch and ocean in the background. “He’ll get a kick out of this. They’ve probably got cans flying around the earth in orbit too. What is the universal definition of mankind? Litterbugs!”

“If you have the strength to shoot film, you have the strength to keep looking for the rocks. Upwards!”

With Casey in the lead, as before, they continued
to labor slowly up through the wilderness, stopping every once in a while to scan the surroundings. There were rocks aplenty, but none that were distinctive. Each time they stopped, Jazz looked backward, in the direction of the hacienda. It had become smaller and smaller until it was invisible in its cluster of trees and garden, and now its site was blocked entirely by a bulging bump of stone covered with strands of mesquite.

Jazz heard Casey humming snatches of a tune as he scrambled, and realized that she too was hearing a melody in her head. She put words to it and gave a wry smile. “How are things in Glocca Mora?” were the words that ran endlessly in her head. Glocca Mora, the village in
Brigadoon
that appeared only once every hundred years, and then disappeared again into the Irish mists. Or was Brigadoon the village in
Finian’s Rainbow
that disappeared into the Scottish mists? Never mind. It was too hot to figure out. It didn’t make any sense.

But the Sentinel Rocks were no village, they were a place specifically mentioned in the handwriting of Bernardo Valencia on a map. Bernardo Valencia had been the grandfather of Juanita Isabella Valencia Kilkullen, making him at least Jazz’s great-great-great-grandfather, she thought fuzzily, and if you can’t trust a great-great-great-grandfather, who can you trust? Not only that, but Millard Fillmore had put his signature on that map. For some reason this fact gave Jazz a powerful feeling of hope. There was something about that particular name, destined by reason of phonetics to be the butt of jokes, that sounded decidedly presidential.

“Casey, what are you humming?”

“The theme music from
The African Queen
. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

“Casey, can we stop for lunch?”

“You starving?”

“Gotta eat.”

“O.K., but only for a few minutes. We have to
find the rocks and get back down again before sunset, and it’ll be dark in four hours.”

“What if we don’t find them?”

“We’ll come back tomorrow. We’ll keep looking until we do.”

“My leader, my inspiration, what did I do before I knew you?” Jazz asked as she found another rock to sit on. The air was cooler here, although the sun was high overhead. She took off her jacket and pulled her wet cotton shirt out of her jeans. Her bandana was so soaked that she spread it out on a small rock and allowed the breeze to dry her face and neck and hair.

“I often wonder what exactly you did. Not a wasted life, I’ll bet,” Casey answered.

“Not wasted, definitely not wasted,” Jazz assured him, as she handed him a sandwich. “But definitely not fulfilled.”

How could she be so much in love, she wondered, looking at Casey, sprawled on another rock. How was it possible to be so much in love with somebody you
liked
so much? Gabe—she’d been overwhelmed by him, passionately in love with him, marked for life by him, but had she ever really liked him? No, somehow
like
was not a word she could ever apply to Gabe. Sam—she’d liked Sam … who wouldn’t … but his actor’s ego amused her too much for her ever to love him. And the others—not one of them had ever even come close.