Yours Truly

by Heather Vogel Frederick

  I knew she meant it as a compliment, but I didn’t see the resemblance at all. The original Truly and I were both tall, a fact I know because it said so on her German passport, a faded document that was hanging in a frame in the upstairs hall. Aside from her name, though—which clearly said “Trudy” and not “Truly,” so the idiot at U.S. customs had no excuse for messing it up and forever changing her legal name—I couldn’t decipher the German script. Aunt True could. She’d lived all over the world and spoke half a dozen languages, and she translated the passport once for me. The original Trudy/Truly came from a town called Lutterhausen in Germany, shortly before the Civil War. She had just turned eighteen when she arrived in the United States. Aunt True and I both beat her by two inches, heightwise, but she was still nearly six feet, which was really tall for a woman back in those days. The passport described her as “schlank,” which my aunt told me means “slender,” and her hair and eyes were listed as “braun”—“brown,” like both of ours. There was no mention of freckles, though, and I hadn’t detected any on her portrait. I, on the other hand, had a generous helping of them.

  Mackenzie took a selfie of the two of us standing in front of the portrait.

  “Perfect!” she said, showing it to me. “We look adorable.”

  Adorable? More like an ostrich and a finch, I thought. If my cousin were a bird, she’d be something small and cute, for sure. Definitely a finch, or better, a painted bunting, like the one I’d spotted last year in Texas and that had birders in New York City all atwitter a while back when one was seen in Brooklyn. Colorful as a box of crayons, the painted bunting was one of the most eye-catching species in North America. It fit Mackenzie to a tee.

  “Cameron will love this,” my cousin said, tapping on her cell phone as she sent off the picture. “He still can’t believe your name is actually Truly.”

  Her phone vibrated almost immediately in response. She read the incoming text and smiled. “Cameron says hey.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Hey back.”

  We climbed up a few more steps.

  “Who’s that?” Mackenzie asked, pointing to another portrait. My grandparents’ entire stairwell was lined with long-gone Lovejoys.

  “Matthew Lovejoy,” I told her. “He was Truly’s husband. She met him just a few weeks after she arrived in New York. He was staying at the hotel where she got a job as a maid, and it was love at first sight. At least Gramps told me once that’s how the story goes.”

  My cousin sighed. “That’s so romantic! I can see why she fell for Matthew. He’s really cute.” She took another picture. “Is that a uniform he’s wearing?”

  I nodded. “He was a soldier in the Union army.” Our family’s military tradition went way back, lots farther than just my dad. Matthew fought in the Civil War, and there were Lovejoys who fought in the Revolutionary War too.

  Mackenzie wrinkled her nose. “The Union army was the Northern one, right?”

  I grinned. History had never been my cousin’s thing. “Yeah.”

  We continued upstairs, pausing at each of the remaining Lovejoys so Mackenzie could take their pictures. “What’s that jingle you told me that you made up, to help remember their names?”

  “Obadiah, Abigail, Jeremiah, Ruth,” I singsonged, pointing to each one in turn. “Matthew, Truly, Charity, and Booth. But it only works going downstairs.”

  We decided that Mackenzie should finish unpacking before I gave her the rest of the tour. I’d cleared out a couple of drawers and made space in my closet for her stuff, but there still wasn’t enough room.

  “You’re only here for a week!” I exclaimed, emptying another drawer. I jammed the clothes it contained under my bed. “Did you have to bring everything you own with you?”

  “Just because you always dress like you’re on your way to a wrestling match doesn’t mean I have to,” she said loftily.

  I glanced down at the ratty sweats I’d thrown on after swim practice this morning. She had a point.

  The corner of her mouth quirked up in a smile. “Your room looks good, at least.”

  Up until now Mackenzie had seen my bedroom only on her computer screen, when the two of us videoconferenced. It was Aunt True’s bedroom when she was growing up, and it had always been called the “Blue Room,” since it was decorated in blue and white. I had a blue bedroom at our old house back in Austin, too—our old new house, really, because we’d only lived there for a few months before we moved here to Pumpkin Falls. Mackenzie had helped me pick out the perfect shade of aqua for its walls: Mermaid. I still dreamed about that color sometimes, and I’d been thinking of asking Gramps and Lola if they’d let me repaint my room here, too. If we stayed, that was, which it looked like we were going to, now that the bookstore was on more solid footing.

  After Mackenzie finished unpacking, I showed her the rest of the second floor.

  “Six bedrooms and three bathrooms?” she said, incredulous. “This place is huge!”

  “And that’s just the second floor,” I pointed out. “There are more in the attic.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  “People had big families back when they built the house. At least that’s what Gramps told me.”

  Mackenzie gave me a sidelong glance. “Even bigger than the Magnificent Seven?”

  That was what my father called our family. It was the title of his favorite old movie, and the theme song was the ringtone on his cell phone. I nodded. “Even bigger than the Magnificent Seven.”

  Mackenzie was an only child, and I knew sometimes she envied the fact that I had so many brothers and sisters. That was because she didn’t actually have to live with them.

  We made a quick detour to Lauren’s room so my cousin could say hi to all of my younger sister’s pets.

  “I’d forgotten how many you have!” Mackenzie said as she made the rounds.

  “Nibbles is my hamster—” Lauren began.

  “And Thumper ith the bunny, and Methuthelah ith the turtle,” Pippa finished.

  “I want a kitten too, but Mom and Dad keep saying no,” Lauren said.

  “No kittens for me, either,” Mackenzie sympathized. “Hooper wouldn’t like it.”

  Hooper was my cousin’s beagle. He was old as the hills and always rolling in gross things, but she loved him anyway.

  Pippa tugged on her sleeve. “Want to play Barbieth with me?”

  “Um, we’ve got plans, Pipster,” I said. “Maybe later.”

  We finally managed to extricate ourselves, and I led Mackenzie to the door at the end of the hallway that led to the third-floor stairs. “If you thought Lauren’s room was kind of stinky, brace yourself. This is where Hatcher and Danny live.”

  Mackenzie followed me up the steep, narrow staircase that led to my brothers’ lair. “Whew!” she exclaimed, waving her hand in front of her face when we reached the top.

  “Told you so. Total man cave. That’s why I mostly don’t come up here. What is it about teenage boys, anyway? Their rooms always smell like a cross between sweaty gym socks and wet dog.”

  My cousin giggled.

  “So Aunt True told me that back in the old days, the maids and hired help lived up here,” I continued. “Check out their bedrooms.”

  I showed her a row of closet-size rooms that branched off the big, central, open area my brothers had commandeered for their headquarters.

  “Are you kidding me?” Mackenzie’s eyes widened. “Where are the closets?”

  Nowadays, my grandparents used the tiny rooms for storage, but back when there were servants living in the house, there would have been just enough room for a twin bed and a small chair or night table. At least there were windows.

  “People in those days didn’t have many clothes, and servants had even fewer,” I explained. “Gramps said they just hung everything on hooks.” I pointed to a trio lining one of the walls next to the door.

  I watched as my cousin absorbed this information.

  “Not exactly Mackenzie-friendly, right?” I said wi
th a grin.

  She stuck out her tongue at me. “Hey, I can’t help it if I’ve gotta have my closet space.” Looking around, she added, “Where are the bathrooms?”

  I held up a single finger, and she gave me another incredulous look. “Are you kidding me? One? For all those servants?”

  “There probably wasn’t even indoor plumbing back in the early days,” I told her. “Gramps said that when he was a kid, there was still an old outhouse behind the barn.”

  “Eew.”

  “No kidding.”

  “So is there an attic too, or is this it?” Mackenzie asked.

  “This is it, mostly. There’s a little more storage space through there.” I waved a hand at a door at the far end of Hatcher and Danny’s lair.

  “Can I see?”

  “Sure.”

  Someone had left the light on inside. Lauren, most likely. She’d been spending a lot of time up here lately, rooting around through all the old stuff. There was a lot of it—Lovejoys hated throwing anything out. The attic was where Lauren had found all of Aunt True’s childhood books, including the set of Nancy Drew mysteries, and a bunch of other relics belonging to earlier generations of ancestors. She kept showing up at the dinner table dressed in the strangest outfits. White leather gloves that nearly reached to her armpits, moth-eaten shawls, hats with veils, that sort of thing. Mom thought it was funny, but my brothers and I thought it was weird, and told Lauren so.

  Mackenzie surveyed the scattered jumble of boxes and trunks and moldering magazines and random pieces of broken furniture that littered the cramped space. A dressmaker’s dummy sporting a sun hat leaned against an old armchair with the stuffing hanging out of it; a battered table covered with dust held an old birdcage, one of those ancient record players you had to wind up to play, and some fishing tackle; off in the shadows toward the eaves were a bicycle and an ancient wicker baby carriage and more boxes than I could count.

  “Look at all this cool old stuff!” Mackenzie took another picture.

  I snorted. “You and Lauren should start a club.”

  “How old is this house, anyway?”

  “1769. It was built the same year that Nathaniel Daniel founded the college.”

  “This is seriously amazing,” she said. “I can’t wait to tell Cameron all about it.”

  Cameron will love this, Cameron will love that, I thought. I could tell I was going to get really sick of hearing about Mr. Perfect by the end of the week.

  It was getting close to lunchtime, so I decided to save the rest of the house, including the barn turned garage and my grandmother’s art studio above it, for later. “We’d better get going, if you want to see some of Pumpkin Falls before afternoon swim practice.”

  We stopped by my room to pick up our gear. Since Mackenzie was on a swim team back in Austin, I’d been given special permission from Coach Maynard to bring her along to practice this week at Spring Break camp.

  “We can leave our stuff at the bookshop and pick it up right before practice,” I said. “That way we don’t have to come all the way home for it. Oh, and I have one more thing to show you,” I added as we fished our jackets out of the front hall closet.

  “What?”

  I led my cousin to the tiny phone booth under the stairs and opened the door. “This.”

  My grandparents were just about the only people on the planet who still had a landline, and the dank closet with the faded, peeling wallpaper was where they kept their ancient rotary phone. My dad claimed it was the same one that was there when he was a kid.

  “Gramps and Lola are true Yankees,” he liked to tell us. “Thrifty to the core. You know your grandfather’s favorite saying, right? ‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.’ ”

  The phone booth was one place in the house that I could certainly do without. “I hate it when I have to take a call in here,” I told Mackenzie.

  She poked her head in and wrinkled her nose at the musty smell. “Yeah, but it’s still kind of cool. That phone is totally retro—check out that vintage dial!”

  I closed the door. “Um, yeah. My point exactly.”

  Glancing over at another door just beyond the phone closet, Mackenzie asked, “Where does that go?”

  Now that I thought about it, there were two places in the house that I could do without.

  “The basement,” I replied. “Trust me, you don’t want to go down there.”

  “Sure I do! I want to see everything!”

  I sighed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  I watched from the safety of the hallway as she tiptoed down and took a quick peek around. Quick, because the basement was always freezing cold, for one thing—the house still had its original dirt floor and stone foundation—and quick, because, well, my brothers didn’t call it the spider farm for nothing.

  I wasn’t afraid of a whole lot of things, but spiders combined with my grandparents’ dark, creepy basement? I shuddered.

  “Okay, you were right,” Mackenzie said, clattering upstairs again a moment later.

  I closed the door firmly behind her. “We definitely don’t need to go down there again.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “This whole place is like a movie set,” Mackenzie said happily a few minutes later, as we headed down Hill Street into town. “Fade in to Pumpkin Falls,” she intoned, slipping into her fake radio announcer voice again, “a small, charming New England college town—”

  “Emphasis on small,” I added.

  “—complete with historic houses,” she continued, ignoring me, “a church with a steeple that I want a tour of, by the way, so don’t forget, a village green, a world-famous waterfall—”

  I snorted. “World famous? Right.”

  “—and crowning it all, a spectacular covered bridge.”

  Snapping pictures right and left, my cousin continued her breathless narration all the way to the bookstore, where she made me stand under the LOVEJOY’S BOOKS sign so she could take yet another picture for Mr. Perfect.

  “It’s Miss Marple!” she cried when we finally went inside.

  My grandparents’ golden retriever, who’d been napping on her dog bed by the sales counter, heaved herself up and trotted over, tail wagging.

  “Take a picture of us,” Mackenzie ordered, passing me her cell phone.

  “Greetings and salutations, girls!” said Aunt True, emerging from the back office. “You’re just in time for a snack.”

  “Pumpkin whoopie pies?” asked Mackenzie hopefully.

  My heart sank. I’d sung the praises of our bookshop’s signature treat to my cousin, but, to be perfectly honest, I was kind of tired of pumpkin whoopie pies. They’d certainly proven a success—my mother says Aunt True is a marketing genius, and one of her bright ideas was to create a treat designed to lure customers into the store. The strategy had worked, as people often stopped by for a whoopie pie and rarely left without buying something. But I’d eaten so many in the past month that I didn’t think I could choke down another one.

  “Sorry, Mackenzie, but I decided to switch it up in honor of Maple Madness,” my aunt told her. “May I present . . . Bookshop Blondies!” She pulled a tray out from beneath the sales counter and whipped off the tea towel that was covering it.

  “Mmm,” said Mackenzie, reaching for what looked like a brownie, only lighter in color. I took one too.

  “Oh man, these are delicious,” said my cousin, grabbing a second one before she’d even finished her first.

  “That would be the secret ingredient,” Aunt True told her, looking pleased.

  I paused midbite. One of my aunt’s last secret ingredients had been yak milk.

  “Maple sugar,” she continued, and I relaxed. “I’m going to enter them into the Maple Madness Bake-Off.”

  The annual Bake-Off was another Pumpkin Falls tradition. From what I heard, the competition could get pretty heated, which was kind of ridiculous, especially since there weren’t any prizes. Just a blue ribbon and stupid Maple M
adness Bake-Off winner bragging rights. But that was Pumpkin Falls for you.

  There was a commotion in the back corner of the store just then, and my aunt looked over and sighed. “If you have time, girls, maybe you could help Belinda,” she said. “We’re just about ready to send another shipment to Namibia.”

  A couple of weeks ago my aunt had come up with another marketing idea. One of my grandparents’ Peace Corps projects was building a library for the school in the Namibian village where they’re staying, and Aunt True decided that it would be fun to help fill its shelves—drumming up a little extra business for our store while we were at it.

  The Buy a Book, Send a Book campaign invited every customer who bought a book to buy a second one to donate to the new school library in Africa. If they did, they got a 50 percent off coupon for their next purchase. My aunt downloaded photos of our grandparents with the village kids, and used the pictures to design a really cool flyer and poster for the window. She advertised the program on our website and in our newsletter, and she got the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle to write an article about it too. Everyone in town knew Gramps and Lola, and their faces, along with all those smiling village kids, had been like catnip to our customers. So far, we’d shipped off three big boxes of books for the new library.

  “Add this to Miss Marple’s Picks while you’re at it, would you, Truly?” my aunt said, passing me a book. “Face out, please.”

  Miss Marple’s Picks was another of my aunt’s promotional ideas, a twist on the typical “staff picks” shelf that most bookstores offer. Not only had it increased sales, but it had also turned my grandparents’ dog into a minor celebrity. Miss Marple had been profiled by newspapers all over the world, and she even had her own column in our bookshop newsletter (ghostwritten by Aunt True, of course).

  Helping myself to another Bookshop Blondie, I made a quick detour to Miss Marple’s Picks, where I shelved the book my aunt had given me. Then, trailing Mackenzie in my wake, I headed back to the children’s section to help box up more books for Namibia.

  “No, Harold, you may not go to Africa!” I heard Belinda scolding as we approached. Her voice was oddly muffled, thanks to the fact that she was leaning so far down into an open cardboard box that only her bottom was visible. The bottom in question appeared to be covered with another pair of overalls—white ones this time.