Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel Read Free

glanced up warily when Rosa led Elizabeth into the front room, but they quickly recognized the pretty young farmwife with the blonde bob, so after returning her bright smile with bashful grins, they returned to their play.
    Rosa left them and went to retrieve the Nelsons’ and Jorgensens’ mail from the kitchen. Although John bore the title of postmaster and collected the paycheck, Rosa sorted the mail and was most often the one who met the valley’s residents at the door when they came to collect their letters and parcels. Since purchasing the roadster, John had been too busy touring the countryside to pay any more attention to the daily mail than he did the ripening crops. The work had fallen entirely to Rosa, and as she sorted envelopes and boxes on the kitchen table in between tending children and folding laundry and preparing meals, she wished that she could claim John’s wages for herself. She couldn’t help tallying his income in her mind and calculating how many months he would have had to work, saving every dime, in order to purchase that loathsome automobile. How could he have amassed enough money unless he had mortgaged the farm?
    Rosa had to know.
    As soon as Elizabeth left, she would search John’s desk for bank documents. She had already checked the strongbox where they kept the deed to the farm and other important papers safe from brush fires and earthquakes, but of course he had not put any mortgage papers there, where she could easily find them. He would have put them somewhere out of sight, someplace where she wouldn’t accidentally discover them while dusting or putting away clothes.
    Rosa brought the bundles of letters back to the front room and gave them to Elizabeth, who thanked her and added, “I found something in the cabin that belongs to you.”
    The ramshackle cabin on the Jorgensen ranch? Rosa had visited it many times, long before the Nelsons had made it their home, but she had always been careful to leave nothing behind.Bewildered, Rosa waited while Elizabeth took the mail out to Lars’s car and returned with two folded quilts—but Rosa knew she had never left any quilts at the cabin.
    While Rosa, Marta, and Lupita looked on, Elizabeth set one quilt on the sofa and began to unfold the other. Rosa glimpsed homespun plaids and wools in deep blues and dark barn reds and forest greens, sturdy and warm—and suddenly she recognized the pattern. With an eager gasp, she reached out to take the bottom corners of the quilt, lifting them so the quilt unfurled between her hands and Elizabeth’s. The quilt was comprised not of square blocks but of hexagons, each composed of twelve triangular wedges with a smaller hexagon appliquéd in the center where the points met. The quilt had been well used and well loved, with tiny quilting stitches outlining each piece and many more arranged in concentric curves so the hexagons resembled wagon wheels in motion. The slight shrinkage of the wool and batting in the wash throughout the years had created a patina of wrinkles all over the quilt, and Rosa could almost imagine she knew each one by heart.
    “
Dios mío
,” she murmured.
    “It is your great-grandmother’s, isn’t it?” prompted Elizabeth. “I recognized it from the photograph you showed me.”
    “Without a doubt, it is hers.” As Rosa’s gaze traveled over the quilt, long-forgotten memories came alive—her grandmother in a rocking chair, the quilt tucked around her lap. Rosa and her younger brother, Carlos, draping the quilt over a table and pretending it was a tent high in the Santa Monica Mountains. Climbing beneath it and snuggling up to her mother after fleeing to her parents’ bedroom in the dark hours of the night, frightened awake by nightmares. Yes, she knew the quilt intimately. “It is just as I remember it.”
    “Almost but not exactly,” said Elizabeth. “It needed some mending. I matched the fabric as best as I could when I replaced worn pieces.”
    Rosa smiled, touched by