California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (61 page)

South
Fork,
American
River

April
18, 1906

5
a.m.

The sound of the waterfall rushing out
from beneath the lip of ice filled Alex Todd's ears as he gazed up the
riverbed, watching for the first light of the sun to rise over the Sierras. She
had asked him to scatter her ashes here—at sunrise. It was the least he could
do, he thought, marveling again at the woman he had married, been separated
from, "involved with," "remarried" in 1870, and then had
lived with for the past thirty-six years.

He was seventy-seven years old, and
despite his robust health the trip from San Francisco had tired him. He was
cold, even with the overcoat and boots and the blanket wrapped around him. It
had been years since he had spent the better part of a night out under the
stars. But she had asked him to do it, and, by God, he would. At precisely sunrise.
He had not carried out her other request—to wait until after he scattered her
ashes before reading the diary. But then again, she had warned him in their
last conversation that the contents might be a shock. That he ought to read it
sitting down. And then adding, her frail face wrinkling mischievously as she
burst into a peal of pitifully weak laughter: "Perhaps at the doctor's
office, in case you have a heart attack!"

He chuckled, remembering her wry, often
sardonic wit: It had not left her, even at the last when she was a
silver-haired shadow of her former self. He turned briefly, his gaze sweeping
downriver to the new dam going up just beyond the point where her cabin had
once stood. Turning back, he looked up at the sheer cliffs on either side of the
fall.
All of this will he gone
, he thought. Buried under the new lake
the dam will create. The river, the cliffs, the waterfall—and the gold down
there. All traces of her life during those first years after it happened.

He understood now why she had saved the
clipping that reported the hanging of Isaac Claussen for an obscure murder in
Virginia City. But he still could not believe all the diary contained. That
would take time. Knowledge too sudden. Almost more difficult than the night he
had learned she was alive.
Almost… incredible
, he thought. But he knew
Esther; knew she would never tell him it was true unless it was. All of it.
Good
God, what they can hide from us.

He thought of the quiet life they had led
for more than three decades at the ranch they built on the property Murietta
left her just west of Twin Peaks. Unremarkable, pale by comparison to what was
on those pages of hers.

He wondered whether she had actually
killed Mosby herself. No one would ever know. He had never been found, and
neither had
Solana.
Sutter,
even if he had known anything about it, was long since dead. Whatever the facts
were, Alex did not wholly approve of what Esther had done. He wished he had
never left her at Bent's Fort, or that somehow he had been a part of a more
lawful means of bringing Mosby to justice. But done was done, and he couldn't
be certain he would not have been moved to the same vengeance. The irony that
he might easily have killed Mosby himself once, in that hotel room, did not
escape him.

He didn't care a damn what anyone else
might think. It had been Esther's request—in the letter he found inside the
cover—that he have the diary sealed, placed in trust under irrevocable
arrangements to have it delivered to her oldest surviving direct descendant in
the year 1945. He had been so puzzled by that distant date, one hundred years
after she began writing the diary, that he sat down and read the journal then
and there. It was not until the following day that he recovered his wits enough
to remember her comment about the doctor's office, or the typical closing
sentence in her letter:

"By 1945, perhaps some use could be
made of this material by a writer of fiction, since surely no one will ever
believe it."

The diary was sealed, rested now in a
vault at the Crocker bank. Appropriate, he thought, trying to remember what
Charles Crocker's private car looked like. She could have died in the damned
thing. Or in any number of other places. But she hadn't, choosing instead to
take her leave two days earlier as the sun set on the Pacific and the wind
hushed in the evergreens surrounding the ranch.

Even if it all came to light
now
, he thought,
few would
deny she had tried to atone for what she'd done
. He wondered for a moment
if God had forgiven her. Her school in Sacramento now housed, fed, and educated
two hundred homeless Indian and Mexican-American children. She had poured half
her wealth into the school, the San Francisco Orphan Asylum, and other
charities. With everything else she had done, she still found time to be an
exemplary mother, a good wife. He was certain God would take all that into
account.

He suddenly remembered her as a girl—in
the barn in Ohio, dark-haired, laughing, long-legged, and beautiful. Then
silver-haired and still lovely, her leg over his in bed, giving as much warmth
and security as she received. His eyes filmed over.

She always had the time, never denied him
anything within reason, had been a fine companion and friend during those last
thirty-six years. Secretly—people simply wouldn't understand—he had felt
himself blessed to be married to a woman whose strong sexual appetite had
carried through into her early sixties. He knew that somehow that had kept him
young. And if she was a bit domineering at times, occasionally reminded him of
things even a fool could remember, well, she had more than made up for that,
too.

Among other things, she had given him two
more children. He tried to picture all three of them when they were young, but
the memory faded. He saw them instead in their present surroundings. Todd
(whose name they'd legally changed to Todd Carter Todd; known to one and all as
"T. C.") on the floor of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, barking
out an order. Alex, Jr., in the cloakroom of the U.S. Senate, wearing the scar
from a Mauser bullet along his jawline like a badge—a memento of the
Spanish-American War that had helped get him elected. And Eliza, as she liked
to be called, whirling on the dance floor of an ostentatiously oversized
ballroom in a mansion on Russian Hill. He wondered about her. She was as
headstrong as Esther and, Alex guessed, just as sexed. She was married to the
deputy mayor of San Francisco. But rumors that the child she gave birth to on
the day Esther died was not the deputy mayor's were almost too substantial to
be ignored.

Well, it is her life
,
he thought.
And whatever Eliza gets herself into, she'll have to travel a
far piece to match the one Esther lived.
He sighed. Glancing eastward, he
saw the first hint of light over the mountains. Getting up, he tested the ice
to see if it was firm, then walked out to the middle of the fall carrying the
urn containing Esther's ashes. He waited to make sure it was not a false dawn,
then looked at the antique gold pocket-watch that Esther had unexpectedly left
to him… 5:13. He wondered about the antique watch for a moment—where it had
come from; how long it had been in the desk drawer with Esther's diary.
No
way to know or ever find out
, he thought. Shrugging, he tipped the urn, and
the second line Esther had written in her diary, at Bent's Fort sixty years
earlier, rang in his mind:

"I did not know one
could love and miss another human being so."

As the last of the ashes disappeared in
the water of the fall and his eyes became moist again, he felt the tremor in
the ice beneath his feet, saw the earth along the riverbanks ripple. For a
second he thought it was just the tears, or that he had lost his senses for a
moment, but then the trees shuddered and waved slightly again as the second
tremor rocked the ice and he heard it began to crack behind him. For an instant
he had the impulse to scramble for the safety of the bank. But then he decided
he would rather stay where he was.

The ice crumbled, falling away in huge
shards as he plunged downward. He smiled as the shockingly cold, rushing water
enveloped and swept him downstream, knowing that Esther could not be far ahead,
that nothing could ever separate them again. He did not hear the sound of the
great earthquake as it reached the South Fork from San Francisco two minutes
later. Like the dark, satisfied laughter of Miwokan's sun god, it echoed
between the sheer cliffs flanking the fall, then raced on toward the crest of
the Sierras.

Daniel Knapp
was born in New York City where he attended public and private schools before
becoming a scholarship athlete at North Carolina State and New York
Universities. He has written and edited fiction and non-fiction for such
national publications as TIME, The Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Life, The New
York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, West Magazine,
Performing Arts, People, Show, and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. His
Esquire
profile of Mao Tse Tung, “A Day In The Life Of The Chairman,” has been
translated into a dozen languages, and included in anthologies and university
textbooks. He is the author of the bestselling “as told to” biography
Going
Down With Janis,
a scathing look at the underbelly of the early rock world
and the life and times of rock star Janis Joplin. He also wrote
Baccarat,
a study of the high roller game and the man who brought it to Las Vegas after
escaping Cuba’s civil war. When the print edition of his novel, California
Woman was originally published, it sold approximately a half million copies. He
is presently at work on a stand alone sequel to California Woman entitled THE
WOMEN IN TYLER’S WILL. He now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife of 34
years, Leslie, and their two Burmese cats, Bodhi and Mandalay. Formerly head of
the division of biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge, his
wife is now the Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of
Utah. They have travelled the world together pursuing primate research and new
subjects for fiction.