The Secret of La Rosa

By Donald Willerton

It was just a short cross-country ski outing over the Christmas break for Mogi Franklin and his sister, Jennifer–until they find themselves suddenly caught in a vicious blizzard. Near collapse, they ski into a mysterious valley with an ancient hacienda, a busy Spanish family, and a village with no electricity, no plumbing, no cars, no phones, and definitely no Walmart.


A vacation that began a few days earlier helping his Granddad clean and decorate for a huge family celebration had now become a mind-boggling mystery. And young Mogi's anguish trying to come to terms with his grandmother's death from cancer the previous Christmas turns to fear and danger when he is accused of stealing a religious icon the town prizes above all others–and which holds the key to solving an ancient legend of missing Spanish gold.

It's the latest book of the exciting Mogi Franklin Mysteries–shadowy figures, secret societies, a town like no other. Is this all reality or illusion? Mogi must find the answers, even as he struggles with the memory of his grandmother's death and the mysteries of faith it brought him which he now must answer as well.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terra Nova Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781948749282

Donald Willerton

Don Willerton grew up in a small town in Texas, surrounded by hundreds of square miles of open country, and the desire to wander has never left him. A successful career as a computer programmer and project manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory gave him the money and vacation time to learn how to build houses, backpack in the Rocky Mountains high country, climb mountains, snowshoe and cross-country ski, raft the rivers of the Southwest, support Christian wilderness programs, and see the excitement in his sons' eyes as they enjoyed the adventures with him.

Book preview

Mother

Padre Franco Dominguez sat quietly in a small candle-lit room built of mud bricks and wondered why he had become a Jesuit priest in the first place.

The son of a blacksmith, he’d been learning the craft at his father’s feet and learning it well. A good boy, a proper boy, skilled with a hammer and anvil, but hardly one given to books or the pen. It was remarkable both to him and his family when God called him to the priesthood.

Padre Franco had spent his early days in Spain learning to serve the Holy Church and to understand its mysteries. He had been a passionate young man, strong and dedicated, upright in his religious practices, and anxious to share his faith with all who would hear. It was a day of joy when he was selected to travel to the New World to bring the word of God to lost souls.

But, he now admitted, he hadn’t planned on bringing the word of God to lost souls in, well, such an isolated place. He had settled where God had led him, in a small village nestled deep in a mountain valley, remote from crowds and markets, distant from learned conversations, and far from good wine and jovial brotherhood. It took three days of travel to reach a proper town.

While in his priestly training, Padre Franco had dreamed of the mission fields he’d heard about along the coast of California. Ah, now that was the life he had seen in his future—living near the sea, journeying up and down the coast, working with other friars, priests, and monks as they toiled endlessly among the native people. He dreamed of large orchards, sprawling vineyards, and vats of wonderful drink.

And the mission churches! Oh, the stories he had heard. Wonderfully constructed of brick and stone, immense sanctuaries of arching rafters with bell towers and fountains and gardens of flowers and who knew what else. Fine places where a priest could serve in comfort! Padre Franco leaned his chair back and smiled.

The back legs of the chair snapped and the good padre was sent sprawling across the dirt floor. A small cloud of dust rose as he stood and gave the broken chair a swift kick across the room.

He had wanted to serve in California. Instead, he had been sent to the northern provinces of Mexico, far from Mexico City in a land they called Nuevo Mexico.

His ultimate destination unknown, he had traveled the Royal Road, El Camino Real, with a caravan of merchants. They rode through great expanses of cactus and sagebrush, mile after mile of wild country with no civilization, and days of thirst and burning sun. It taught him humility, and it taught him faith. After a long day of traveling, tasting the grit and dust stirred up by the huge freight wagons and their oxen, and smelling the constant stench of the cattle brought along for food, he followed his prayer schedule with a certainty he had not felt in more comfortable circumstances.

After struggling through the desolate southern section of the trail, Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, he left the caravan and traveled west into the mountains. He believed the villages in the mountain valleys, though they held fewer people than the plains, would offer a richer soil for the cultivation of souls.

As if led by God’s invisible hand, he found the people he would make his own. It was a small valley with a broad, flat bottom, fed by a steady stream. The kindness of the people, their eagerness to listen and to work together, and the mutual respect and honor he felt among the villagers was surely as great as the flocks of the Californian missions.

So the padre smiled a little as he gathered the splintered pieces of wood and stacked them neatly in the corner. He would mend the chair tomorrow. It was yet one more instance of God teaching him humility.

Tonight, as he took another stool from the corner and sat back at the table, he needed to concentrate on other things, to think about his situation. The good padre had a problem, and it centered around the gold in his trunk.

Padre Franco Dominguez was a servant of God working by the grace of the Mother Church in Mexico City. And as it was with all priests scattered in tiny outposts, he was watched over by the bishop of a large church on the outskirts of the big city. The bishop was his teacher, his guide—and his judge.

Unfortunately, his bishop was Jean Baptiste. He and Padre Franco did not like each other, to put it mildly, and the roles of teacher and guide were overshadowed by the bishop’s preference for the judge part of his role.

Bishop Baptiste was convinced of the need to build a new church in the valley—a big church, one that would reflect the greatness of God. Of course, it would take the labor and resources of the natives to build it, and many years. But who counts years when glorifying God?

Padre Franco hated the idea so much that he could hardly sit still. A large church building would bring no more glory to God than the padre’s simple chapel on the plaza. It was the hearts of the people that brought glory to God, not buildings.

Bishop Baptiste was even more insistent that the local villagers contribute part of their income for supporting the church’s work in Mexico City. He believed that every member of the padre’s flock should be giving money on a yearly basis, and that a fifth of their income was a proper amount.

A fifth!

The idea was preposterous. The bishop had spent too long in the big cities, surrounded by wealthy believers.

The men in the padre’s valley were pastores, simple herders of sheep, sometimes with a cow or two, living in the adobe homes so common in the countryside. There was a blacksmith (a man the padre loved to visit), a few weavers of wool, a small number of women who made the pottery shared throughout the families, and a few men who gathered meat and provided protection from bears and wolves. Those who farmed did so on small plots of land dotting the valley, growing enough apples, corn, beans, and chiles to eat, to trade, and to store for the winter.

There might be a hundred families in the village where he lived. Several of the families lived in an old hacienda of apartments built around a central plaza, of which the padre’s room was a part. Other families lived in homes scattered along two nearby streets. Up and down the length of the valley, on little farms and ranchos, there might be a hundred more.

That was it. Every family worked, and all of their work was needed to live. It was a careful balance achieved through many years of living together, a balance between needs and goods. The people were, by nature, kind and generous. Being forced to contribute to Mexico City, or to work on a building for which they received no return, would do nothing to increase their virtue, nor their devotion.

Padre Franco had spent many hours in prayer over the bishop’s demands for the building and the donations, but the source of his present problem lay outside the valley.

Many Indians made their homes scattered about in the surrounding mountains. Padre Franco considered them part of his field of work, as did Bishop Baptiste, but the bishop saw them as just another source for filling his collection plate.

The Indians, however, were even less likely than the villagers to have actual money. Printed bills or stamped coinage had never been part of their culture, and they were mostly hunters, so they did not produce goods such as wool or cloth. Thus their natural generosity did not translate to any currency that the church in Mexico City would find useful.

Nonetheless, the Indians did appreciate his services. They looked upon the padre of the valley as a holy man, giving him respect as they did their own medicine men. They liked the crosses, the statues, the padre’s special clothes, and the big book of his god’s stories. They especially liked the padre’s teachings about miracles.

Padre Franco sighed.

Yes, the Indians liked the miracle stories—walking on water, restoring a blind man’s sight, feeding thousands with only a few fish, the calming of storms. To them, healing was powerful medicine, abundant food was the mark of someone who understood hunger, and control over nature was simply wondrous to imagine.

But Jesus was the Worker of Miracles, not the padre. It was hard to convince them of this when it was the priest who spoke the words. As a result, the Indians brought gifts to Padre Franco, expecting that miracles would result. They had far fewer things than the villagers, but the Indians, long traveled over every square foot of the mountains and valleys and plains, had one resource that few would have imagined.

They had gold.

Gold was what they most often brought to pay for their miracles. They knew the whites valued the golden rocks from the earth and the shiny little flakes from the streams. The gifts came quietly, hung from his door latch during the night, mysteriously appearing at his campfire as he made his visits, or openly delivered in deerskin bags and turtle shells.

The Indians liked the jewelry the gold made, and they valued it as a trade item among the tribes. But a good horse was considered true wealth. Good rains were important. The stars, moon, and sun were significant. Colors from the earth used to paint their bodies were valued.

A gold rock was just a pretty stone.

They brought other stones, too, such as turquoise and amethyst, and their children brought mounds of pretty rocks as well—quartz, iron pyrite, and copper. But mostly it was gold, and before long, the padre had quite a lot of gold nuggets and a few bowls full of flakes.

He could have solved this problem with a few choice projects—perhaps a new wood floor for his room? Some ornaments from Santa Fe’s craftsmen? Candlesticks? A new chalice? Padre Franco would have especially liked a bell to hang above the chapel doorway.

He thought of buying things for the village, but there was that problem of balance. The villagers needed nothing for which money was required. If gold were introduced, somehow, somewhere, the devil would invade the innocence of the valley, the long practiced balance of goods and needs would be upset, and things would never be the same.

So the gold remained in Padre Franco’s room, stashed in a trunk in the corner.

But it could not stay that way for long.

In two months’ time, the bishop would visit, expecting the padre to have made good progress in the harvest of the Lord and expecting to collect an offering for the Mother Church in Mexico City. If the visiting bishop discovered any hint of unusual items not local to the valley, if he saw new items that had been purchased instead of being made—if he even smelled unusual riches—he would be relentless in finding the source of the wealth.

If he discovered the gold, or any sign whatsoever of gold sources nearby, the news would spread like wildfire. There would be no end to the troubles. The church in Mexico City would expect far greater contributions, hundreds of people outside the Church would invade the valley to dig wherever they pleased, land grabbers would swindle the simple people out of their homes and fields, and the Indians would be tortured unmercifully for the sources of their valuable stones.

The good padre knew that the people and the land would be forever ruined. He could not, would not, let that happen.

He had come close to throwing his mounds of gold into the cracks of the mountain gorges nearby, or burying them in the forest, but the gold had been given for the glory of God, even if the theology was a little misunderstood. He couldn’t even bring himself to throw away the mounds of