by Mary Leo
I sat up. “Yeah. Just lost my balance. I’m fine.”
“You need my help?”
“Nope. We’ve got it covered.”
“Okay,” she said and that was that. Nothing short of a broken appendage stopped Maryann from picking. She was like a one woman machine. Every year we had a contest to see who picked the most olives and Maryann always won.
“I carry you to bed,” Giuseppe said.
“What? No,” I told him, but I clearly liked the vision. “I’m fine. Really. But I wouldn’t be if you hadn’t caught me. Thank you.”
“It was my pleasure,” he said with a sensual smirk.
He stood and extended a hand.
When I was back up on my feet, I went straight over to the tree to check out the branch. I couldn’t understand it. I had never fallen from a tree. I was always so careful.
As soon as I walked closer I could see what had happened.
“Ah, the ladder, she was rotten,” Giuseppe said.
“Impossible. I just bought it this year.”
He leaned it back from the tree, tilted it on its side and there it was. We both saw it.
Someone had cleverly cut the very rung I had been standing on. Not all the way through, but just enough so that after I stood on it awhile it would break.
I was just about to collapse in a torrent of hysterics when he said, “This is not so good. You have an enema.”
“Enemy,” I corrected, chuckling at his bad English.
He smiled, shrugged and we laughed out loud. One of those tension releasing kinds of laughs. All I could think of was what a great laugh he had. The man was a total charmer and I was a sucker for a charmer.
He slipped his hand under my chin. “When you smile you look just like your papa.”
His words felt like a slap. I backed away from his touch. “My papa? How would you know that?”
My heart raced, and there was a lump in my throat. I could feel my entire body stiffen. How could this man know my dad? That seemed totally impossible. In my blind lust for his touch, I must have misunderstood him. My dad was one of the mysteries of my life. As far as I knew, no one knew if he was alive or dead. It seemed impossible that this Young Turk could know anything about him when my own family didn’t.
He held a finger over his mouth. “Shhh,” he whispered, turning away from Maryann, and the rest of the pickers. I pulled off my gloves and followed right beside him, anxious to hear what he had to say.
“Your papa, how you say? He no can come out. Too many enemies in America, but he got a lot of friends in Italia.”
It just seemed impossible for this Italian import to know where my dad was living when we had been looking for him since I was twelve. How could this be true? I needed more information.
“So,” I said. “You never actually saw him?” I figured this Turk didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Ma-sure. Your papa, how shall we say, an important man in Calabria. He send me here, you know, to ask for the . . . ring and if he no give, then to do some work.”
I decided to play along with this elaborate hoax. It had to be, right? “Do some work on Dickey?”
He shrugged and bobbed his head in complete gangster fashion letting me know I was exactly right, but not really saying it out loud. “I call him. We meet. We talk and he say no. Then before I can, you know . . . another person do my work.”
“But why did my father want Dickey’s ring?”
He shrugged again, grinned and looked at me as if I was the silliest person alive. “I no ask this kind of question. I am a picciotti d’onore, a soldier. I follow the orders from the capobastone.”
It hit me like a ton of olives! I was convinced he was telling me the truth. My own father, the man who had disappeared like Jimmy Hoffa, was not only alive and well, but he was some kind of boss in the worst mob Italy had to offer, ‘Ndrangheta, and he had put out a hit on his own cousin, Dickey.
I so needed a drink.
Fifteen minutes later, after having picked only slightly more than a bucketful of olives, I called it a day. Giuseppe packed my now broken ladder back in my truck and I left him on the side of the road with Federico giving him picking orders.
I was on a quest for a big, overflowing glass of wine. I was absolutely going to drink it this time. And not just one glass, the entire bottle seemed like the way to go. I even decided on red rather than white. It reminded me more of blood, and blood was the word of the hour. My blood, my dad’s blood, and Dickey’s . . . we were all related, but that didn’t seem to matter in this family. Vendettas mattered more than blood, and heaven help the person who stepped in front of a personal vendetta.
I drove my truck, loaded with my viciously tampered with ladder, back to the barn and parked behind my mom’s house, completely distracted by my quest for wine.
Heading straight for the case I’d shelved in the barn the night Dickey was murdered, I figured I’d grab a bottle of Leo’s Pinot, and show up on his doorstep wearing my best rueful smile. We’d have great make-up sex and I’d be over this ridiculous sobriety I’d enforced on myself forever.
Whose idea was this sobriety gig anyway? Certainly not mine.
After my tryst with Leo, I’d return refreshed and renewed to help my mom and aunts prepare tonight’s feast. There was always a big feast the last day of our first harvest. We had one more harvest that would take place sometime in early November when the remainder of the fruit was at its peak of ripeness. That would constitute a major party, but for now, we celebrated all the hard work and the fact that it didn’t rain during the harvest. Rain during harvest is the single most destructive natural force for olives. Even a mist can hamper a successful harvest. Fortunately, neither of those scourges had taken place, so we were in for a fantastic harvest, and what looked like a profitable year.
I had phoned Lisa on my short drive back to the barn, wanting to share the news that my dad was alive and well and playing Godfather in Italy, plus I wanted to tell her the sinister details of my attempted demise, but she still wasn’t answering.
Opening the barn door, I was eager to get on with my new found sobriety freedom when I ran smack into Nick Zeleski. There were several other men in dark suits who were busy snooping around. Two police officers from Santa Rosa stood watch just inside the door. I figured the whole group must have parked in the tourist lot, and had come in through the opposite door or I undoubtedly would have seen them, even if I was utterly distracted by my desperate wine need.
Before I could say anything, Nick said, “Sorry about this, Mia, but I have reason to believe something happened to Dickey Spia while he was on your property, specifically in this barn. Gloria Spia gave us permission to have a look around.”
I opened my mouth to protest just as Uncle Benny walked out from behind a row of shelves and stopped me. “Once your mom gave him permission, there’s nothing we can do, Mia.”
“Why? What happened?” I asked, upset that these intruders had not only destroyed my perfect wine vision, but were now causing weeks’ worth of work to put everything back together again. Not to mention that they were sure to find blood evidence that Dickey was murdered about ten feet away from where we were all standing.
“Do you know a man named Peter Doyle?”
My knees almost buckled as I flashed on the notary who had signed the last page of my mom’s documents, the now missing page of my mom’s documents. But why would Nick know about the notary?
“I—”
Uncle Benny interrupted. “She never heard of him. And even if she did, she does not have to tell you anything.”
I closed my mouth. Nick grinned. “This will go a lot easier if you cooperate, Mia.”
“She has nothing to say,” Uncle Benny said.
I knew enough to listen to Uncle Benny and keep my mouth shut, but at the same time I wanted to know what this was all about. I moved in front of Benny. “Never met the man.”
“But do you know who he is?”
This ques
tion presented a problem. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to offer the truth either. Especially since I could feel Uncle Benny’s eyes burning a hole in the back of my head. “What does Peter Doyle have to do with any of this?”
“Neighbor found him locked in his garage early this morning with the motor running. It might have looked like a suicide if it wasn’t for the piece of paper shoved in his mouth. Funny thing about that piece of paper, it was eight years old and notarized by one Peter Doyle. Seems he’d notarized a document that gave all this land back to Dickey Spia if he was ever released from prison. Peter’s mistake was he’d been blabbing that info to a few of his friends and neighbors. Do you know anything about that document, Mia?”
My mouth went dry. I wanted to spill my guts but Uncle Benny stopped me.
“She does not know anything. She has been out in the hot sun all day, picking olives. She is tired and cannot think straight.” Uncle Benny gave me a look and I knew I should keep my mouth zipped, as Hetty liked to say.
As I gazed around at the people snooping and tearing at our barn, something odd struck me. Why weren’t there more police, more local sheriffs buzzing around? And why was everyone dressed so, well . . . trendy? Their suits fit perfectly, and their shirts had color, not the drab white most detectives wore. And why in hell did everyone except for Nick look so Italian?
Nick interrupted my concerns. “I paid a visit to that worker your mom said cut himself while assembling the antique millstone and he didn’t know what I was talking about. Not a scratch on him. Any idea why your mom would lie?”
I didn’t answer. Instead I stood there, wide-eyed and trying desperately to hold it all together. Trying to piece everything together. Nothing was adding up, at least nothing that my now completely muddled brain could figure out.
“My mom doesn’t lie,” I told him.
Benny said, “That’s all she has got to say right now.”
Nick was silent for a moment then he looked at me and said, “Maybe you’d feel more comfortable talking to me at the station.”
“That won’t be—”
“She will talk when I see a warrant,” Benny said. “Till then, I’ll answer whatever you want to know.”
“That’s fine,” Nick said. “Can you—”
But just then a woman in a designer suit called him over to the antique mill and he walked away.
When he was out of earshot Benny mumbled, “Keep away from him, Mia. He is big trouble for the family, if you know what I am saying. Go help the women with the cooking. I will take care of this,” Benny ordered, cigar smoke encircling his head.
I nodded and walked away as random thoughts floated into my overworked brain. I mean, what if Benny was actually behind the murders? Maybe he felt as though he was protecting my mom or the orchard or himself from some past deed, like the murder of Carla De Carlo.
Or was this recent murder just another hit that my mobbed-up father ordered and Giuseppe snuffed out Peter Doyle right before he flirted with me out in the grove.
But which thug sliced my ladder? What motive would Benny have had, especially if he was courting my mom. And I knew Giuseppe didn’t do it, he’d offered to climb my ladder.
I couldn’t believe either one of these guys would try to hurt me or the orchard. Giuseppe was simply a henchman for my dad, which was weird in itself, and no mob boss would try to kill his own child. It just would never happen. Even the worst gangsters had their limits when it came to their young.
So it couldn’t possibly be either one of them.
That would explain some things. I mean, why would anyone connected with this recovering family and this land do all this nasty stuff when it obviously incriminated everyone living and working on this land, not to mention that it could completely close us down with no chance reopening.
That’s when the obvious answer hit me right between the eyes . . . the killer wants to close us down.
But why?
“It’s all happening too fast,” Mom said as she pulled the perfectly toasted brochette bread out of the oven. She was referring to the meal she and every other woman in my family were preparing in her kitchen and not the events in the last forty-eight hours.
It was now late in the afternoon. Spia’s Olive Press was already getting bad press on the local news stations and was essentially shut down until the police were finished with their investigation. It seemed the blood on the millstone was enough evidence for a warrant and those trendy detectives wanted to search more than just the barn. Now they were busy with the tasting room as we cooked. Uncle Benny was working hard on fixing all of that, but so far he wasn’t having much luck. Essentially, the entire establishment was shut down. Given how slowly these detectives were working, we would probably be shut down tomorrow as well.
Nick and his team tried to get statements out of everyone, but that proved a waste of time. My extended family acted like captured soldiers repeating rank and tag numbers, only with my family they repeated the health benefits of olive oil.
“Mom, I really need to talk to you. It’s important,” I said, while I chopped a ripe plumb tomato for the salad. No response so I leaned in and whispered, “I need to know how your bracelet got under Dickey’s feet in the barn?”
She turned to me, forehead practically wrinkled, lips tight, eyes glaring as if she was about to pounce. After a moment, she looked away, took a breath and chugged an entire glass of red wine. When she finished she carefully placed the glass down on the table and turned back to me once again, looking much calmer. “Is that where you found my bracelet? Under his feet?”
I nodded. “Plus I have other news. Can we go upstairs for a few minutes?”
“No. I don’t want to.” She stomped her foot, like some bratty kid. “I’ve got way too much cooking to do to answer your questions. I had enough questions thrown at me for one day. My head’s going to explode, and my timing’s all off as it is. The stuffed zucchini are gonna be done way before the pasta pomodoro, and my braciole di manzo needs another twenty minutes to simmer. The beef was a little tough. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today. I can’t seem to get it together. We can talk later, dear. Right now, I have to cook.”
She smiled at me and brushed my check with her flour-covered index finger. Mom was busy kneading a firm ball of dough for the fresh recchitedde, tiny round pasta disks that she would layer with a thick, tomato pork ragu. Fresh linguini hung from the wooden dowels of a sturdy rack that Federico had made for her several years ago when her collapsible laundry drying rack toppled over from the weight of the pasta and, “heaven forbid,” she’d had to use packaged pasta for our Christmas dinner
“But—”
She held up her hand.
“Fine!” I said. “Later.”
“Try to be nice, darling. It’s so much more becoming.”
I wanted to scream. I had so much to talk to her about, but lately it was never a good time for her. Of course, she was right, now was most certainly not the time. She was obviously experiencing a culinary meltdown at the moment and talking to her about my dad and her bracelet would only add to the cuisine challenge.
“It’s all that louse’s fault. May he rot in hell,” Hetty said, making the sign of the cross then kissing her bunched fingers.
Maryann, who busied herself assembling the roasted red pepper and artichoke salad, had a different view. “Dickey’s in purgatory, not hell and I don’t care what you say about him.” She slammed down the cleaver she was using to chop artichoke hearts. I was glad of that. Hurling sharp objects was not something I wanted to be involved in.
She began to weep. Zia Yolanda joined her at a much louder pitch.
Hetty went over to Maryann, careful not to actually touch her. “I’m sorry, honey. How about you play us something fun on your accordion? We could all use a little cheering up right now.”
Maryann nodded, swiped at her tears then wiped her hands on the white apron she was wearing, walked over to a chair in the corner of the kitchen,
picked up her ever present accordion and began to play Dean Martin’s Volare.
“Volare, oh-oh, Cantate oh-oh-oh,” she crooned.
Zia Yolanda smiled through her tears and began to sing. It was the first time I’d ever heard her actual voice, which was completely off key.
Aunt Hetty and Aunt Babe drowned her out and joined in. “Let’s fly way up to the clouds, away from the maddening crowds.”
Then Valerie and my mom chimed in. “We can sing in the glow of a star that I know of, where lovers enjoy peace of mind.”
I would never admit this to anyone, but I knew every word by heart. My mom must have played it a million times while I was growing up. I sang as loud as I could. “Let us leave the confusion and all the delusion behind. Just like birds of feather, a rainbow together we’ll find. Volare, oh-oh, Cantate oh-oh-oh . . .”
We sang the entire song, each of us busy with food preparation, smiling as if all was right with our little world, but we all knew better. That was the endearing feature about my utterly dysfunctional family. Each and every one of us had developed a coping mechanism that seriously distorted our perception of reality, and whether that perception was good or bad, it was what got us through the tough times.
When the song ended, Maryann continued to play while the rest of us continued to chop, pour, sauté, bake and plate the massive meal. We seemed to be in a collectively better mood, or at least everyone else was when we finally served the meal to our friends, family and the hired pickers who had helped bring in our first harvest of the season.
We spread the meal out on long sturdy tables in mom’s front yard, everyone taking a seat around the yard to chow down on the fabulous Italian delicacies, enjoying not only the food, but the wine and each other. Laughter rose up from the crowd and for a brief moment, I allowed myself to simply enjoy the ambiance.
We’d be picking and pressing on and off for the next couple of months, but the first full day of harvest was the most important. It gave Federico a good idea of how good the harvest would be, and according to how heavy the trees were with fruit, we would have a bumper crop this year.