Sundown Crossing Read online

  Tom, Peter, Angie and Carla all sat around the dining-room table. Sam, who had no interest in the proceedings, was building some kind of structure with the Meccano set he loved that Rolfe had found for him.

  Tom sat at the head of the oblong table and patted his bald pate with his left hand, smoothing back what few strands of hair there were, while his right hand took a folder and other papers from the attachée case and put them on the table top.

  ‘A sad occasion,’ he began then stopped to clear his throat and put his glasses on. ‘Rolfe and I were good friends and I’m going to miss him, as we all will. Still, because we all knew him well, we know that he liked to be organised. He left a simple will updated a year ago, so it accurately reflects how he wanted to dispose of his assets.

  ‘As it’s a formal document, I’m legally bound to read it in its entirety. So, please, any questions you might have should be left until the reading’s complete.’

  Carla blinked furiously to hold back a threatening flurry of tears. Not yet. Later you can cry your eyes out, but just get through this, she told herself. This reading of the will underlined the reality of a death, the finality of a loved one having left this earth forever. She had been through the process before, with Derek. Not that her late husband had had much to leave other than a few sentimental, family trinkets, his mother’s jewellery and a modest parcel of shares which were to be held in trust for Sam. And with the small pension she received from Derek’s insurance policy together with what she earned as a teacher, she and Sam were coping if not well off. Her gaze focused on her son playing unconcernedly with his Meccano bits and pieces, his features taut with concentration as he placed screws and bolts together and tightened them with the accompanying child-sized wrench.

  She never tired of the joy of watching him—at play, watching television, asleep. After Derek’s death, which had shattered her emotionally for some time, he had been her salvation, given her something to cling to and focus her energies on, and he would be her salvation now. Somehow they would both grow and survive this sadness. She gave a mental shake and tried to concentrate on Tom’s words as he began to read…

  ‘…Is the last will and testament of Rolfe Wilfred Kruger who, being of sound mind, does bequeath to his one and only daughter, Carla Janine Hunter, the following property as stated…’

  The vineyard. Of course, that’s all he had to leave her…

  ‘And furthermore, to my daughter I bequeath a property and all it entails, known as the Krugerhoff Vineyard, namely parcels of land known as lots four, five and six of approximately forty acres in the Barossa Valley in the State of South Australia, Australia, as detailed on the attached title deed.’

  ‘What…?’ Carla’s eyes opened wide. She stared first at Tom then at Angie who shrugged, and smiled mysteriously, as if she had known all along.

  Tom held up a hand. ‘Carla, let me finish then I’ll explain.’

  The details of the will finished with bequests to Angie and, to his surprise, a small one to Peter Cruzio.

  ‘What’s this Barossa thing about? I…I don’t understand…’ Carla shook her head, her forehead creasing in a frown. Her father owned property in Australia! How? Why…? He had never talked about it, never given an inkling and…all she knew about the Barossa Valley was that it was the prime grape-growing region in the entire country and that her father had grown up there before moving to Italy.

  Tom shook his head, and said in a grumbling tone, ‘I told, suggested, that Rolfe tell you himself but he was adamant that you didn’t need to know until after he…after his death…’ He glanced down the table at Carla, saw her expression and hurried on. ‘Your father was Australian, you knew that, didn’t you? Well, he, his birth surname wasn’t Kruger, he changed that by deed poll in 1963. His true surname was Stenmark.’

  ‘Stenmark,’ Peter interrupted, his voice pitched higher than normal. ‘Of the Stenmarks, the Rhein Schloss Stenmarks?’

  ‘Right. Rolfe is, I mean was, Carl Stenmark’s younger son,’ Tom advised.

  Carla blinked, stared first at Tom then at Angie and Peter. ‘Who are the Stenmarks?’

  ‘Just about the biggest wine producers in the Barossa,’ Peter, who’d spent a few years in South Australia learning about vine cultivation, informed her.

  Carla’s eye narrowed. ‘So…so, this Carl, he’s my grandfather?’ My God. Carl. Carla. She had been named after him and had never known it! Hurt by her father’s silence, the lost opportunities to know family, she turned away from them to hide the sheen of tears in her eyes. She had a grandfather and perhaps other family members and she had never known because…her father hadn’t wanted her to. A festering anger began to simmer inside her. ‘Why didn’t Dad tell me? Did my mother know?’

  Tom looked a little abashed. ‘To the best of my knowledge, Gina didn’t. Rolfe said there’d been some kind of um…family argument after which his father disinherited him. It’s a long story…and…’ He reached into his attachée case and pulled out a long book with a black cover. He pushed it down the table towards Carla. ‘Rolfe said you were to have this—it’s his journal. He wrote it a long time ago, and told me that it explains everything.’

  ‘So where exactly is the property in the Barossa?’ Angie, ever the businesswoman, asked.

  ‘I believe it’s near the township of Nuriootpa and has a creek known as Greenock Creek crossing it twice. It’s located just off the Sturt Highway, close to the Seppelts vineyards.’

  ‘There has to be more than forty wineries in the Barossa Valley. This Krugerhoff, the land alone must be worth a bloody fortune,’ Peter said in an awed tone.

  ‘These are the deeds and a description of the buildings it contains.’ Tom passed a plastic envelope over to Carla. ‘At your father’s request I contacted a property agent there about three months ago. He checked the place out. The buildings still stand but many are in need of repair because they’ve been unattended for more than thirty years and,’ he delved into his case again and brought out another sheet of paper, ‘curiously, this was faxed to me two days after Rolfe’s death. If you’re interested in selling, it’s an offer from a company in the Barossa. I believe it’s a fair one, according to the property agent I’ve been in contact with.’

  Carla’s head was beginning to spin. Property in the Barossa, offers to sell it. A new link with family other than the Bardolinos in Italy. It was too much to take in, especially an hour or two after her father’s funeral.

  ‘May I?’ Angie asked, looking at Carla for her permission to read the offer.

  When she did, her lips formed an ‘O’ and a low whistle came out. ‘My God, are they serious?’ She passed the letter on to her friend. ‘They’re offering you a small fortune.’

  Carla’s eyes rounded at the sum of money being offered by a Mr Luke Michaels of the Michaels Realty Marketing Company. If she sold, her financial worries would be over. She could move up to Valley View and continue to develop her father’s dream—something he had wanted her to do, though when Derek had been alive, such a move had not been possible. Her late husband had had no interest in vineyards and they’d stayed in Christchurch, so Derek could be near his beloved ocean. She, being a dedicated landlubber, had never quite understood Derek’s passion for the sea but she’d respected it.

  ‘Will you sell Krugerhoff?’ a curious Peter asked Carla.

  ‘I’m not going to rush into making any decisions until I’ve thought everything through. Perhaps I’ll even go to the Barossa and check the place out for myself.’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ Tom wanted to know. A steely glint flickered in Carla’s eyes and he recognised it because it was a carbon copy of the way her father would look when he was determined on a particular course of action. ‘You’ve just told me I have family, Tom. Family I never knew about. I’d like to meet them and I’d like Sam to have the opportunity of knowing them, even if Dad was the black sheep of the family. Australia’s considerably closer than Italy, and less expensive to get to, where I have lo
ts of cousins. But first I intend to read my father’s journal and then I’ll decide.’

  Carla wriggled into her bed attire, an extra long T-shirt that had belonged to Derek. On the nightstand stood her father’s journal. It was thick—more than two hundred pages of her father’s neat, spidery writing. For a few seconds she was tempted to open it and start reading but her heart wasn’t in it. She was too emotionally drained from the day’s events to concentrate on what it contained. She would look at it first thing in the morning.

  Yawning, she looked across at Sam in the other single bed, and studied his sleeping form. She moved towards him, took his thumb out of his mouth, his habit left over from babyhood, and smoothed back his straight, ginger hair before tucking the doona up around his shoulders—he was a restless sleeper and tended to throw the covers off during the night.

  He had been good today. At the cemetery and later, helping with the food and being so polite. Dear, brave little mite that he was. Hadn’t shed a tear either. Her dad would be proud of that. But this, another sadness after the death of his father. It was making him grow up too fast and shortchanging him of his childhood.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you, Sam, that’s a promise, son,’ Carla whispered. ‘One day you’ll have the best of everything and if I have my way, other family members to love you…’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dawn was peeping over the window sill, lightening the spartanly furnished room when Carla woke. Her sleep had been filled with strange, disturbing dreams and she knew she would not rest, or be able to make any decisions, until she read her father’s journal. She shivered as she got out of bed. The morning air was decidedly cool. Wrapping her dressing gown around her she checked to see that Sam was fast asleep then picked up the journal and tiptoed over the polished timber floors out to the living room in her father’s small house.

  He and Angie kept a very neat home, everything in its place, few ornaments and clutter. His one concession to ‘messiness’ was a circular table on which stood an assortment of photographs. There was a family photo of herself with her mother and her father. It had been taken by a fellow passenger the day they disembarked from the ship in Auckland after sailing from Italy. A wedding photo of herself and Derek stood beside it and there were several photos of Sam as he’d grown from babyhood. There were, she suddenly noted something that had not seemed important before, no photos taken before 1972.

  She picked up the one photo that included her dark-haired mother. Gina Bardolino-Kruger had been beautiful in her youth. The nail on Carla’s left index finger traced the outline of her mother, her expression wistful because she hadn’t seen her for several years. Gina had never been able to adjust to the New Zealand lifestyle. Language difficulties, though she could speak haltingly in English, climatic differences between Northern Italy and chilly Christchurch and the collapse of her marriage had, over the years, turned her mother from someone with a cheerful, sunny disposition to a woman who constantly complained about missing her life and family in Italy and resented Carla’s father, whom she blamed for everything.

  From her job as a sales assistant in a fashionable women’s dress shop in town Gina had managed to save enough to go home to Vicenza, near Venice, for a three-month holiday with family, members of which Carla could barely remember. While there her mother had become so immersed with her family and the lifestyle that she had only returned to Christchurch once since, to see Carla after Sam’s birth.

  Over the ensuing years, as Sam grew, the tyranny of distance and Gina having family to be involved with, combined with Carla’s need to consolidate her teaching position after Derek’s death, their once close relationship had dwindled. Nowadays they took turns in making bi-monthly phone calls and, on Carla’s part, she wrote the occasional, long letter. The distancing was something she regretted and had once agonised over but she was mature enough to understand why it had happened though it would have been nice for Sam to have the opportunity to know his maternal grandmother better.

  Putting the photo down, Carla sat in Rolfe’s favourite armchair, permanently positioned so he could look through the open drapes of the living room window at the vines. The worn leather creaked under her weight as she settled. She tucked her legs up under her to keep her bare feet warm, opened the journal and…inserted in the first page of writing was a folded-up note. She opened it and recognised her father’s writing. A lump of emotion lodged in her throat, because he’d written it knowing she would read it after his death.

  Dear Carla,

  Forgive me for taking the coward’s way out and not explaining the details of my past to you while I was alive. The memories were too painful to me so I hope you’ll understand, and forgive.

  With love, Dad.

  She re-folded the note, tucked it in the pocket of her dressing gown and glanced at the date at the top right-hand corner of the journal. Tuesday, 3rd January, 1962… her father, born in February, would have been twenty-four years old at the time he’d put his thoughts and experiences into the journal. Before she began to read she flipped through the pages, many of which were dog-eared and stained with either food or liquid—evidence that they had been turned and read many times over the last thirty years.

  She began to read and try to visualise what her father had written so long ago…

  The Stenmark household was in an uproar. Head of the house, Papa, had instructed their housekeeper, Lilly, to have every room in the fifteen-room, two-storeyed home thoroughly cleaned and turned out prior to the arrival of Rolfe’s older brother, Kurt, and his German fiancée, Marta Gronow. Greta Michaels, his older sister, was also in a tizz. Her husband, John, and their three-year-old son, Luke, had been living at Stenhaus since their Mutter passed away three years ago, and Greta had taken on her role of hostess. Greta agonised over everything, wanting things to be perfect—because Papa had said that it must be—to impress Marta, who came from a well-off German family whose lineage included a sprinkling of counts and countesses.

  Lisel Stenmark, the youngest of the Stenmarks, was ten years old and her usual, precocious self. Papa had, since Mutter’s death, spoilt Lisel wickedly and she got away with far too much. With all the preparations going on for Kurt’s return, she spent before and after school hours walking around with a petulant pout because everyone, including Papa, was too busy to pay her the usual amount of attention she demanded.

  For Rolfe’s part, with all the commotion going on, he was pleased to have a valid excuse to be away all day, at Krugerhoff. From dawn until dusk he tended the vines, many of which were mature enough to bear fruit and were heavy with ripening grapes. He had two labourers who helped him, Otto and Ernst. This summer, after harvesting, Rolfe would put down Krugerhoff Vineyard’s first vintage, which promised to be a very good one.

  I know that Papa is cross with me, though he tries to hide it, Rolfe thought as he descended the front steps two at a time towards his recently bought Holden utility. Papa’s displeased expression at breakfast this morning made it clear that he thought Rolfe should be working for Rhein Schloss, the family’s vineyard, instead of at his very own vineyard. Papa’s displeasure and an overall awareness that he was not the favoured son because he didn’t meekly adhere to Papa’s wishes and had his own views on many subjects, was something he had to live with.

  Carl Stenmark, Papa, was of the old school. The family had left Germany and come to Australia in the late 1800s, and Papa was as autocratic as his late grandfather, Wilfred, had been, though for the most part Carl was a benign tyrant.

  Dear Mutter, God rest her soul, had done the right thing by leaving him an inheritance of forty acres and enough funds to start his own vineyard. After all, Kurt, the elder by two years would, as the eldest son, one day inherit all of Rhein Schloss. Rolfe had grown up knowing this and by the time he’d reached his early teens had formed the opinion that it was important to cultivate and develop his own vineyard to show Papa, and Kurt, that he could and would be independent.

  Planning Krugerhoff Vineyard, na
med in memory of his Mutter’s maiden name, was the hardest and most responsible work he had attempted and, while Papa had never uttered a word of praise or interest, he believed, perhaps because he wanted to, that Carl was a little proud that he had done well on his own initiative. Greta and her husband, John, had been his most vocal supporters and praised his efforts, which had given him the confidence to go on when, several times he had lost faith in his own ability to succeed. He was grateful to Greta and his brother-in-law for that.

  Carla sighed and looked away from the words in the journal. Reading what her father had written so many years ago, his thoughts about himself and his family, was a strange experience and she was already seeing—in a few pages—the beginning of the man he was to become, the father she had known and loved. One thing she didn’t want to do was to read it too quickly. She wanted to take her time, to absorb the layers behind the written words, to understand the feelings, the sense of insecurity and of having to prove himself to his father, something he had clearly tried to do all his life.

  Just getting used to her father’s true surname, Stenmark, was a challenge, as was the new knowledge that in Australia she had a grandfather, an uncle, Kurt, two aunts, Greta and Lisel, and a cousin, Luke. And reading her father’s words—the phrasing was a touch old worldish because it had been written more than thirty years ago, when he was a young man. The formality of the writing, the sense of the Stenmarks still clinging to ways learned in Germany and passed down through later generations, made her recall something Angie had told her, having trained at the viticulture college in the Barossa Valley. The Valley had first been settled by German migrants, some time in the late 1840s, and up until after the Second World War some families who lived there had spoken little or no English.

  Her gaze dropped to the spidery writing again.

  Yesterday afternoon, before going home, Rolfe had stood at the back door of the cottage to survey the rows of vines. It gave him a fine feeling to do so. Work had finished on the stone, cement-rendered cottage and it was now fit for habitation. The bare essentials of furniture had been added—a bed in one of the three bedrooms, a wooden table and four chairs, a large chair by the fireplace—should he decide to move out of home at some future time. A chuckle worked its way up into his throat as he thought of Greta. How she would love to put a selection of unnecessary fripperies and knick-knacks everywhere to give the rooms a lived-in look.