In Sheep's Clothing (6 page)

Aunt Sissy sang at the top of her lungs to the country station that was on the radio. A song about a windshield and a bug. I just looked out the window at all the trees and smiled to myself, wondering why I hadn't had the brains to think up a song about a windshield and a bug. Her voice, strangely enough, seemed to fit right in with all the noise.

Town was about ten minutes away. Olin was sort of like New Kassel, in the sense that it was a one-horse town, if you know what I mean. There was a grocery store that doubled as a post office, a drugstore, a jail, a bar, about twelve streets of houses, a lake—of course, two churches, each with a cemetery—a historical society, and “the homestead” museum. I saw a deli when we first came in, but otherwise no restaurants or hotels. “Where's the school?” I asked Aunt Sissy.

“Oh, they bus the kids over to Cedar Springs,” she said. “All the kids from this half of the county go to the same school. There wouldn't be enough kids to fill up individual ones in each town.”

Well, at least New Kassel had its own school, a few restaurants, and a bed-and-breakfast. “Oh,” I said.

Aunt Sissy waved at a woman on the street and she waved back. Neighborliness was something I could relate to. I would bet that everybody here knew everybody else. Aunt Sissy and Uncle Joe were probably the outsiders. “Did you have trouble when you moved here?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“About being accepted.”

“Oh, that,” she said, and waved. “At first people were real friendly, but it was on the surface. You know? Nobody was rude to us, but we got left out of a lot of things. Guess it was about three years ago when people finally realized that we weren't strangers anymore,” she said. She shifted gears. “But I've never met nicer people.”

“Well, that's good,” I said. If there was one thing I knew, it was that small towns could be terribly cliquish.

She pulled the truck in front of a perfectly square, drab, gray building that had a hand-painted sign that read
OLIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY. PLEASE CALL BEFORE COMING
.

“Please call?”

“It's all volunteer,” she explained. “Sometimes Roberta doesn't feel like coming in.”

“Did we call ahead?”

“No need to.”

“Why?” I asked, amazed at her blatant lack of respect for proper procedure.

“Because on Mondays Roberta's husband is off from work. She's always here on Mondays.”

“Oh,” I said.

We walked in the building to find a woman sitting behind a small student-sized desk. She was about forty and had long dark hair. She looked up from what she was reading. “Hey, Sissy. What's up?”

“This is my niece, Torie O'Shea,” she said. “I told you she might be coming up.”

“Oh,” the woman said, as if that explained it all. “The genealogist.”

“Hi,” I said, and waved.

“My name's Roberta Flagg,” she said.

“Fleg?” I asked, and looked at my aunt.

“F-l-a-g-g,” she said. “You'll notice that a bag is a beg up here, too.”

“Oh,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“My pleasure,” she said. She gave a sweeping motion to the room around her. “Well, this is it.”

I smiled. What was I supposed to do? The room had depressing brown paneling and the floor was concrete that had been painted tan. Filing cabinets filled one wall, and several cases of books lined the wall behind her desk. Glass cases with various memorabilia made a U shape in the middle of the room. Several photographs hung crookedly on the walls. And in a vain attempt to dress up the place, somebody had placed potted plants by windows that sported bright pink curtains. I couldn't help but step over and look at the photographs.

“I hear you're from a small town, too,” Roberta said.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“And you work for the historical society?”

“Yes,” I said, studying a photograph closely. It seemed as though I had found the photographs Uncle Joe had referred to. There were three sailboats out on Olin Lake, with men in suits and women with long beautiful dresses and parasols. I would guess the photograph was taken about 1905.

“So what's your historical society like?” Roberta asked.

Before I had the chance to answer, Aunt Sissy flew into a colorful description of the Gaheimer House and the gowns that I give the tours in and ended with an even more colorful description of my boss, Sylvia Pershing, and her sister, Wilma.

“Oh, Aunt Sissy, I forgot to tell you that Wilma died.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Well, don't that beat all. I honestly thought she and Sylvia were going to be the first immortal human beings,” she said.

“Well, Sylvia's still kicking. I think it would take a train to stop her.”

“Well, nevertheless,” Aunt Sissy went on, “the Pershings were still a pair of great old ladies.”

Roberta put her hand on her hip. “I'm so jealous,” she said.

“Why?”

“You work in a big beautiful house with antiques and you have authentic reproduction dresses? I get four walls, my sweat outfits, and Hank the wandering can collector for company.”

“Olin isn't a tourist town,” I said. “Otherwise, you'd probably have better facilities, too. In New Kassel, that's all we do. We survive and prosper on tourists, so we cater to that.”

“Well, what can I help you find?” she asked.

I pulled out my notebook, which I had shoved down in the back flap of my purse. I scanned my notes and then put it back. “You don't have a microfilm reader here, so I'm assuming this is not where you keep things like census records.”

“I've got a few in book form that some other volunteers and I transcribed one year. What year are you looking for?”

“I'm thinking 1860.”

“Yes, that's one of the ones we have in book form,” she said. She pulled it off of a shelf behind her desk and handed it to me. “Anything else?”

“Where would I get ahold of the census records for Greenup?”

“At the library.”

I nodded to Aunt Sissy. We needed to go to the library, then, if for nothing else than to get a look at the 1850 census for Greenup. “What about church records? I noticed that you've got two churches in town. Do you have their records here or are they at the churches?”

“They are at the individual churches. I think they've been copied by the Latter Day Saints Library, so you can probably find them on-line now. Or at your local LDS Library. But since you're here, I would just go over to the church and ask to see their records,” she said.

“Great.”

“Which church do you need?”

“I don't know. What kind of churches are they? I saw a Lutheran one when we came in.”

“Yes, the other one is Catholic.”

“Mmmm, I doubt that they were Catholic.”

“Why's that?” Aunt Sissy asked.

“She called him a parson in the book. I think even in 1858 if she were Catholic, she would have referred to him as Father or as a priest. I don't think she would have called him a parson. So I'm thinking the Lutheran church would be our best bet. But if I come up empty, I'll still check out the Catholic church,” I said.

“The office at the Lutheran church is open from about ten in the morning to four in the afternoon,” Roberta said.

“Great,” I said. “Oh, and land records. I need to find out who owned a specific lot of land.”

“Do you know when it was bought?” she asked.

“I want to know who owned Aunt Sissy's land before she did.”

“Oh, that's easy,” Roberta said. “The Olsons owned it.”

“No, I mean, all the way back.”

She handed me a stack of books. “The land records we have transcribed,” she said. Roberta was proud of herself, smiling at my Aunt Sissy, happy that she could assist with my hunt. That's the thing about us historians and genealogists. We get almost as much satisfaction helping others with their hunts as we do when we're solving our own mysteries.

I looked around the room and there were no other chairs, so I just opened the books on one of the glass cases and began scanning them. Roberta was correct: Kevin Olson and his wife, Belinda, had owned the property before my aunt.

“So, you're going to try to find the authoress of the novel?” Roberta asked.

I looked at her quickly and then at my aunt. “You know about it?” I asked.

“Of course,” Roberta said. “Sissy tried to figure it out herself, before calling you. She sort of enlisted all of our help.”

“Who's all?” I asked, and flipped a page.

“Everybody in our quilting bee and prayer group,” she said. “Which is one and the same. We all get together and pray that our stitches hold.”

I laughed, which was what I was supposed to do, and flipped another page.

“I'm the youngest one in the group,” Roberta said. “Why don't you come to our next meeting? It'd be nice to have somebody my own age in the group. I'm forty-one, and the next closest is … Diane. She's what, about fifty?”

Aunt Sissy nodded. “About that.”

I did not slap the woman across the face for suggesting that I was forty-one. I was pushing forty, but I wasn't there yet. Instead, I smiled and flipped another page, accepting the fact that I was no longer a spring chicken. It wasn't the fact that I was not a spring chicken that bothered me. It was the fact that everybody else knew I was not a spring chicken. People treat you differently when you're over thirty, and once you hit forty, it's as if everybody just counts you out. Of course, revenge would be mine, because everybody's going to get there, eventually. Probably the same thing that everyone older than me was thinking, too.

“I'm not a very good quilter,” I said.

“Well, you don't have to quilt,” Roberta said.

“I'm not a very good prayer, either.”

“Oh, nonsense.”

“No, seriously. I always think my prayers sound so stupid. So I don't say them out loud if I don't have to.”

Roberta and Sissy both laughed. I was being serious.

I stopped and looked at the names on the page. I had found the next entry to the land that was now my aunt Sissy's. The Olsons had bought it from … the Hujinaks. “Hujinak?”

“Yes,” Roberta said. “What about them?”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Yugoslavian, most likely. There's a large population of Slavs up on the range. They came in around 1900 to 1915 and worked in the iron-ore mines.”

“Oh,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. “The range?”

“The great Mesabi,” she said.

She said it with such matter-of-factness that I dared not tell her I still didn't know what she was talking about.

“Anyway, some of them, if they had the money, would move farther south or west, either to be farmers or loggers. Depending on which area they moved to. This area was once a haven for loggers. All that white pine. But that's all gone now,” Roberta said.

“In other words, this Hujinak family came down from the range to be loggers or farmers?”

“Most likely,” she said. “You can ask them. Good Lord, I think there were thirteen or fourteen kids in that family. Most of them are still in the area. The mayor is one of them.”

“Yeah,” Aunt Sissy said. “Mayor Tom. I never call him Mayor Hujinak. I forgot that was his last name.”

“Everybody calls him Mayor Tom,” Roberta said. “He goes to St. Catherine's, owns a farm out on J highway. His daughter is a riding champion.”

“Riding champion?”

“Horses.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked at Aunt Sissy. “You think I could talk with him sometime this week?”

“I don't see why not. Friendliest guy I've ever met,” Aunt Sissy said.

“Is the Lutheran church the church that you go to, Aunt Sissy?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Is there a church historian or somebody that I could talk to?”

“Mmmm, Lisa. She could probably help you the most. Or even Diane.”

I flipped a few more pages and put that book away. I would need the land records prior to 1930. “Where's the courthouse?” I asked.

“Oh, over in Cedar Springs,” Roberta said.

I flipped through the pages of the next book until I found the Hujinak name. I love unusual names, because they are the easiest to trace. I felt like weeping for people who had to trace names like Jones or Johnson. Or Schmidt! Ugh. Or names that have other uses outside of last names. Like Acre, Justice, or Brown. Those are hard, too. Especially on the Internet. Put in the name Acre, and you'll get all of these hits from people posting land that they want to sell. So a name like Hujinak is a godsend to a genealogist.

“Okay,” I said and got out my paper. “Hujinaks bought the land in 1928 from … Wendell Reed.”

“Don't recognize that name,” Roberta said.

“I wonder why the land stayed vacant so long,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Roberta asked.

“Aunt Sissy said that before the Olsons bought the land it had stood vacant for a long time. The Hujinaks owned it the whole time. So why didn't anybody live in it?”

“I think Mr. Hujinak died in the late fifties, and his wife went to live with one of the kids and died in the early sixties. I never met her, but I remember my mother talking about her. I don't know why it took them so long to sell it.”

“Well, at any rate, they bought it in 1928.”

“Just before the crash,” Aunt Sissy said.

“Yes, I noticed that,” I said. “A year later, they were most likely sweating bullets. Probably thought they were going to lose their farm.”

I kept searching through the records and about ten minutes later found where Wendell Reed had bought the land in 1910. He had bought it from somebody with the last name Hendrickson. Twenty minutes later I had found the entry for the Hendricksons, who had bought the land in 1878. “Hey, eighteen seventy-eight,” I said.