In Sheep's Clothing (3 page)

Aunt Sissy had finally sat down and begun eating her own breakfast. The farm wife always eats last, and it just doesn't seem fair, since she's the one who does all the work. Her kitchen was beautiful. Deep mahogany cabinets hung on two walls and blond wood made up the floor. It looked like pine of some sort. In Missouri, I worked for the historical society giving tours of the Gaheimer House, which is one of the oldest buildings in New Kassel. So I always notice things like beams in the ceilings, wood floors, and mouldings.

“I forgot how beautiful this house is,” I said. I had visited her a handful of times since she moved up here twelve years ago.

“Yes,” she said. “I love it. Sometimes I think it was built just for me, and the land surrounding it was created just for me.”

“I've lived in New Kassel all my life,” I said. “And I sort of feel the same way about it. Like, there's just no place else on earth that I would ever feel comfortable with. But I wonder sometimes if that's just because I've never known any other place.”

“All I know,” Aunt Sissy said, “is when we pulled into the driveway here, I really felt like I had come home.”

“That's great,” I said. Aunt Sissy had been born and raised in southeast Missouri, and lived thirty of her married years in that same area. The fact that she could move in her late fifties and find a place that she liked even better was comforting somehow. As if there's magic in the smallest corners of the universe.

“Of course, the house had been completely renovated,” she said.

“Really?”

“The house that was originally built here is long gone. Well, not completely,” she said. “The back porch and the cellar underneath it are still from the original homestead.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Eighteen fifty-eight,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I saw those numbers carved in the front concrete.”

She gave me a peculiar look and then smiled. “Yes, the steps are the original steps, too. The house burned down and all that survived was the back porch, the cellar, the front steps, and the chimney.”

“Wow,” I said. “When did it burn?”

“Not sure,” she said. “But I know that the land and the ruins just sort of stood neglected for a while and then another house was built here in 1878, I think.”

“Is that this house?”

“For the most part. They just built around the chimney and the back porch and incorporated it into the new house. Isn't that odd?”

“Yeah, sort of. Maybe the person who built it just couldn't tear down what was left,” I said.

“Well, anyway,” she said, clearing her dishes. “There was a fire in that house, too, and it destroyed the far western part of the house. So they rebuilt it. If you walk down the hall toward the bedrooms, you can see where they added the new part after the fire. Because the floors are uneven.”

“Oh, that's cool,” I said. “I love things like that. It gives the house personality.”

“Anyway, a family of thirteen lived here all during the Depression and the war years. Then it stood abandoned all through the sixties and seventies, and finally somebody bought it in the eighties and started renovating it. I mean, they just gutted the house and started from scratch.”

“Wow,” I said. “That's amazing.”

Aunt Sissy put the dirty dishes into the dishwasher.

“You need some help with anything?” I asked.

“No,” she said, putting detergent in the slot and slapping the door shut. She stood there a minute thinking about what to say next. “It took that family almost five years to renovate this house. They put it on the market and nobody bought it.”

“Why? It's a gorgeous house.”

“Well, at the time, it only came with a few acres. The place is hell and gone from any major city. I mean, we're practically smack-dab in between Duluth and the Twin Cities. It would be an impossible commute and there just aren't that many jobs around here that could support living in a house like this. I mean, they were asking a lot of money for the place,” she said.

“So, how'd you get it?”

“After a few years, the family who owned the property next to it decided they wanted to sell off about a hundred acres. So, suddenly, if you put a hundred acres with this house, you've got a farm. Our real estate agent called us in the spring of 1990 and said that there was this place she knew of that had a hell of a house, with a hundred acres adjacent to it,” she said. “The problem was it was in Minnesota.”

“That's an amazing story,” I said.

“Well, yes,” she said. “Because we had told our real estate agent that we were willing to relocate out of state. We'd told her we would move to Colorado, Montana, Wyoming. We never said anything about Minnesota. She just happened across it and thought it was exactly what we were looking for. And it was. When we got here, there were repairs that needed to be done, because it had stood vacant for so long. Outbuildings had to be built. But we bought the hundred acres next to it and the house and have never regretted it one moment.”

“Well, I think this house is you,” I said. “My whole childhood, I remember you and Uncle Joe living on the farm in Ste. Genevieve. And I thought you guys were insane for moving up here. But then, when I came to see you the first time, I fell in love with it. And I remember thinking, well, of
course
she moved up here. Look at the place.”

Aunt Sissy smiled.

“You must love it,” I said. “Because you know a lot about its history. Most people can't tell you the name of the people who owned their houses before them, much less the history you just gave me. All the fires and everything. You must have done some research on it.”

“Yeah,” she said and looked out the window. She paused just a little too long, and it made me worry. “You seen the new quilt I'm working on?”

“No,” I said.

“It's out there on the back porch.”

“On the back porch? Won't the sunlight fade it?”

“Oh, I pull the shades when I'm not working on it. But there is nothing better than natural sunlight to quilt by,” she said. “Go on. Go have a look.”

“Okay,” I said. I went out to the enclosed back porch to take a look at the quilt that she was working on. If I was not mistaken, it was a Lemoyne Star, done in earth tones. Greens, gold, browns. I rubbed my fingers across the stitches that she had most recently sewn. I couldn't be near a quilt and not touch it, just as I couldn't be near a piano and not run my fingers over the keys. Her stitches were so tiny. I had recently begun quilting. I have to admit, it's addictive, and I find myself buying fabric that I don't even have projects for. But I was nowhere near this good, and wasn't sure I ever would be.

Aunt Sissy came up behind me. “This is the porch that survived the first fire,” she said and looked around.

“The quilt is gorgeous.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It's for you. I'm almost finished with it.”

“Oh, Aunt Sissy,” I said, chills dancing down my spine. “You can't give this to me.”

“Sure, I can. I've quilted so many quilts in my life. All my kids got more quilts than they have beds to put them on. You can have this one. You've always been my favorite niece.”

I swiped at a tear and hugged her. Her favorite niece. And that was saying something, considering my father's family was huge. There were many nieces and nephews to choose from. “Thank you,” I managed to say.

“Don't go gettin' all misty on me,” she said.

“Oh, of course not. Never,” I said.

“You see that?” she asked and pointed to a small trapdoor in the floor.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That was the cellar.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering why she was back to this subject. A peculiar feeling flowered in my chest.

“That was where she died,” she said as if it were the obvious next step in the conversation.

“Where who died?”

She shrugged. “Not sure. Neighbor told me there was a girl who died during the first fire. She was in the cellar and died of smoke inhalation,” she said.

“Oh, Aunt Sissy. Neighbors get things wrong,” I said. “She might be overexaggerating.”

She shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Is there … are you … why are you telling me this? Is it bothering you that somebody may have died here? You can't let something like that ruin how much you love this place.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “That's not it.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I don't know exactly,” she said. She paused a moment and opened the back window, allowing a very cool, moist breeze to float across the quilt. “I just think it's a coincidence. And I hate coincidences.”

“What's a coincidence?”

“Well, when the couple that renovated the place started working, they found some things—”

“Not bones, I hope. Please tell me they didn't find bones. Because that will ruin the place for me.”

“No, they didn't find bones,” Aunt Sissy said.

“Whew, good,” I said with a sigh.

“There were things in the cellar and in one of the outbuildings, and they told me that they belonged to the family that lived here during the Depression,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, wondering just where she was going with this.

“Well, they put everything up in the attic and told me that I could do what I wanted with the stuff, since nobody really knew who it belonged to and nobody claimed it. That beveled mirror in the guest room that you're in was one of the items.”

“Very pretty mirror,” I said. I sounded like one of those birds.
Polly want a cracker. Very pretty mirror. Kaaawww.

“So, I kept the stuff,” she said.

“There's no law against that.”

“One of the things I found was a book.”

“A book. What kind of book?”

“Melodrama. You know, like one of those Brontë girls would write.”

“Who was it by?”

“Don't know. That's part of the problem. It was written in longhand, still on paper. It was not bound or published. And there was no name on it.”

She was driving me mad. Why didn't she just tell me what it was she wanted me to know? I stopped and thought a moment. Usually when people did this type of thing, it was because they were uncomfortable discussing whatever the subject was. “Did you read it?”

Color crept into her cheeks. Bingo. She had read it. She felt guilty about reading it.

“Yes,” she said. “I read it.”

“So, what's this got to do with the girl who died in the cellar?”

“I dunno,” she said. “The book is about this young Swedish girl who moved to Minnesota and … she sort of has this torrid love affair. It's quite explicit in places,” she said, and looked away. “And you can tell it's written in the old, old days. The handwriting, the things she talks about. I dunno. It just gave me a weird feeling.”

“Why?”

“Because here's this novel about this young Swedish girl—written at least prior to 1890—and it was found in the cellar. And in that very same cellar a young girl had died. Just the coincidence of it disturbed me,” she said.

“That's
if
a young girl really died in the cellar. If that part of the story is wrong, then there is no coincidence.”

My aunt Sissy was pragmatic and practical. She was never prone to melodrama or overactive imagination, unlike her niece. For her to say that this “coincidence” gave her a weird feeling, it must truly have disturbed her.

“You'd have to read it,” she said. Her eyes flicked nervously toward me. Alas, I had found what it was she was after.

“I'd love to read it. You want me to read it?”

Her whole body relaxed. “No,” she said. “What I really want is for you to find out who wrote it.”

“What?”

She was quiet a moment.

“Is that what you brought me up here for?” I asked. “Is this what you needed the help with?”

“I can't stand it, Torie. I can't stand not knowing who wrote that book. And I can't … It's not finished. The manuscript is incomplete. I'm hoping that if you can find out who wrote it, then maybe you can find out how it ends.”

“Oh, Aunt Sissy, that's preposterous. The chances … Okay, even if I
could
figure out who wrote it, the chance that I'd ever be able to find out how the book ends is just a million to one. A needle in a haystack would have a better chance of being found than an ending to that book.”

“You can do it, Torie. You do this sort of thing all the time.”

Okay, she had me there. Aside from the tours that I give for the historical society, I am a genealogist, a historian, and a record keeper. I mean, this was my area of expertise. But, good Lord. To try and find the missing pages of a manuscript that had been written prior to 1900 … It made my head hurt just thinking about it.

“You do realize that if there was an end to the book, that it would be here somewhere on this property,” I said to her. “And most likely destroyed by either of the fires or damaged by water.”

“No,” she said quickly. “I've thought about it. What if it actually got published? What if whoever wrote it moved and finished it somewhere else? Or just rewrote the whole thing. Or what if somebody took the end of the book when they moved, and just didn't realize they didn't take the whole thing. They could have it packed away somewhere.”

She was certifiable. Years of never wearing socks and exposing her ankles had finally turned her brain to mush.

“Aunt Sissy…”

“You could try. The boys will be fishing. I will do whatever you want. I'll cook for you, take you places. You name it.”

“Aunt Sissy…”

“You're the only person I know who can do this.”

How could I say no? She was my most favorite aunt and she had never, not once in all the years I had known her, asked me for a favor. Not like this. Besides, it might be fun. “All right,” I said. “I'll find out who wrote it. But I'm not promising anything else.”