True Colors

by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

  Imagine. Tom Thumb had slept in our house!

  Mrs. Appleby told a story about her aunt Bertha having the hiccups for three days, which I couldn’t see had anything to do with anything they’d been talking about, and then they got into a discussion about babies, and how Mrs. Potter’s daughter had been in labor for seventy-two hours before having her baby, and when they got to talking about potty training, I up and decided I was going home. I mean, who wants to hear that? Especially before having refreshments!

  I’d already decided I wasn’t coming back, either. After three meetings, I still didn’t have a clue who could have made my quilt.

  I was wondering how I could sneak out (and snitch one or two of Mrs. Thompson’s chocolate chip cookies without anyone noticing) when Esther pulled some pieces of fabric from her ragbag and one fluttered to the floor. It was the blue print with daisies on it.

  chapter 14

  I stared at Esther, trying to see myself in her face. Was she the one I’d been searching for my whole life? But before I could work up the courage to ask her, Esther stood up.

  “The baby was kind of colicky when I left, so I guess I’ll head home early to see how he is. See you next week,” she said, and before I could utter a sound, she left.

  I grabbed up the scrap of fabric and ran after her, my heart thumping against my rib cage like a trapped bird. I didn’t know what I would say to her and hoped I’d come up with something clever.

  When she reached the crossroads, Esther must have heard my footsteps, for she turned and gasped.

  “Gracious, Blue, you startled me,” she said.

  “Are you my mother?” I blurted out, not being clever at all.

  She looked dumbfounded, but then her face softened.

  “No, child, I’m not your mother. Whatever made you think I was?”

  I held up the blue print.

  “This fell out of your ragbag,” I said. “It’s the same as the quilt I was wrapped in when Hannah found me.”

  Esther studied the fabric in my hand.

  “Our group has been swapping quilt pieces for years,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t remember who brought that cloth. I’m sorry.”

  I felt tears stinging my eyes.

  Esther cradled my chin in her hand. She smelled of lavender.

  “I’m not your mother,” she said, tenderly, “but I wish I were. I’d love a daughter like you.”

  I turned and stumbled toward home. I was starting to realize that finding out about my mama was going to be a lot like making a quilt: one piece at a time.

  “Why’d you leave the meeting in such a hurry?” Hannah wanted to know.

  I was careful not to look her in the eyes; Hannah could spot a fib from fifty yards.

  “Esther dropped something out of her bag,” I said, and left it at that. It was the truth.

  Just not the whole truth.

  Over the next couple of days, my deliveries took longer than usual. At every door, I studied the face of the woman who answered it and thought, Could she be my mother? I showed each one of them the print fabric and asked if they recognized it. They all shook their heads.

  I had a dozen cookies to leave at Mrs. Wheaton’s. She loved Hannah’s molasses cookies and ordered a dozen every week. She was old enough to be my great-grandmother, so I was pretty sure she wasn’t my mother. Mrs. Wheaton hadn’t been at the quilting club meeting any of the nights I was there, either, so I was wondering whether to even show her the fabric when she noticed it sticking out of my pocket.

  “That looks like one of Peddler Jenny’s prints,” she said.

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Peddler Jenny,” Mrs. Wheaton repeated. “She came by every summer, selling needles, thread, fabrics, that sort of thing. Some of her cloth came from Boston. It was too expensive for our wallets, but the summer people who came to our group would buy it and bring it to share with us. We loved swapping our pretty feed sacks for those beautiful prints.”

  “What happened to Peddler Jenny?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Blue,” Mrs. Wheaton said. “She just stopped coming around.”

  I had a gooseberry pie and a dozen cookies for Mrs. Tilton. Nadine came to the door with her mom, stuck her nose in the air, and flounced back inside, but I hardly noticed. I didn’t have time to worry about her. Mrs. Wheaton had given me a new lead to follow.

  At supper, Hannah set a bowl of mashed potatoes in front of me.

  “Do you remember a woman peddler that used to come around here?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  “Jenny?” Hannah said. “Sure. She came through every summer, pushing an old baby carriage piled with goods. We always tried to buy something from her, being that she had a no-account husband and nine children.”

  I choked on a spoonful of potato. Nine children! Where would I have fit in there?

  Hannah thumped me on the back.

  “Where’d she live?” I asked as soon as I could speak.

  “I think she lived on the road, poor thing,” Hannah said. “All those children just got dragged from pillar to post.”

  “Do you know what happened to her?” I asked.

  “No,” said Hannah. “She just stopped coming around.”

  “When did she stop coming around?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s see,” Hannah said, pausing to think. “I’m not sure I can recollect, but seems to me it was right around when the war started.”

  The same time I was left in Hannah’s copper kettle.

  chapter 15

  Dreams of driving off with my mother in a brand-new 1952 DeSoto went up in smoke. If Peddler Jenny was my mama, I’d be helping her push an old baby carriage, and instead of ice cream and candy every day, we’d probably be eating roadside weeds.

  I still wanted to find her, to see if she really was the person who’d left me behind. But how could I track her down, I wondered. I’d have to act like a detective, like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. Or Nancy Drew. I could call it The Case of the Disappearing Peddler.

  Raleigh was sweeping when I got to the Monitor.

  “Blue True,” he said.

  Mr. Gilpin looked up when I walked into his office. He was working at his desk, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was scowling, like he had indigestion or something. He looked, well, cantankerous.

  “It’s not the night we make up the paper, so you can’t be here with our usual delivery,” he said. “Too bad. I could use one of Hannah’s doughnuts right about now.”

  He waved a hand at the stack of papers on his desk. “I’ve just finished the scene for the signing of the town charter, in 1802. Most folks don’t know John Paul Jones was one of the original grantees of the town. And did you know that Lafayette visited here? He actually got poor old Colonel Barton released from debtors’ prison.”

  If he was talking famous people, I wondered if Mr. Gilpin knew about Mrs. Fitch seeing Amelia Earhart, or that Hannah had shaken Teddy Roosevelt’s hand.

  “I was thinking of asking Roy Allard to play Colonel Barton,” Mr. Gilpin went on. “I’d get a kick out of slapping him in jail, even if it was just for fun.”

  Mr. Allard was the editor of the Caledonia Record. He’d been at the Monitor a few times when I’d delivered doughnuts, and every time, he and Mr. Gilpin had been arguing about something or other. I took it that they didn’t like each other much.

  “Could I look at some of your old newspapers?” I asked.

  “You mean back issues?” Mr. Gilpin said. “They’re stored down cellar. What did you want to look up?”

  I hadn’t expected to have to give a reason, and my stomach churned. I couldn’t tell him I was looking for my mama; he’d be sure to tell Hannah. Then I heard the paper in my pocket crinkle.

  “Um … I—I’m interested in the circus,” I stammered.

  “You mean that circus that came through about five years ago?” Mr. Gilpin asked, and I nodded.

  “There were some stolen animals—” I started t
o say, but Mr. Gilpin interrupted me.

  “Never did find out what happened to those animals, poor things,” he said. “They’d had a hard life in that circus, weren’t very well taken care of from the looks of them. That’s why we didn’t give the owners permission to come back. But you’re welcome to look up the story on it in our back issues. Anything else?”

  “Um … I’d also like to look up the papers for 1941,” I told him. “I’m doing a project for school.” Good thing Mr. Gilpin didn’t know me that well, or he would have known I would never waste part of summer vacation doing a project for school.

  “Oh, Pearl Harbor,” Mr. Gilpin said. “You want the papers just for December?”

  I swallowed.

  “No, I’d like to see them from the summer, too.”

  “Oh, how things were here on the home front before we entered the war,” he said. Mr. Gilpin was doing a whole lot of assuming, but that was fine by me. Meant I didn’t have to do so much lying.

  “We’ve got a lot of veterans around you could interview for your project, give you firsthand accounts.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Gilpin, maybe I will,” I said. “Right now, I’m just looking up information.”

  “Raleigh,” Mr. Gilpin called. “Show Blue where the back issues are.”

  I followed Raleigh down the narrow stairs and to the back room, where stacks of old newspapers were piled all the way to the ceiling. My heart sank. This was going to be harder than I thought.

  Raleigh pulled a lemon drop from his pocket. It looked fuzzy, with all the lint stuck to it. He held it out to me.

  “No thanks,” I said, and Raleigh popped the lemon drop into his mouth, lint and all. I saw the corner of a baseball card sticking out of his pocket. I wondered if it was one I already had. Did Raleigh collect baseball cards, too? Before I could ask him, he turned and went back upstairs.

  I found the pile of 1941 papers. They were yellow and musty-smelling. I stood on a chair so I could reach the top of the stack, and a cloud of dust made me sneeze. I pulled off the top paper. It was so brittle that some of the edges flaked off when I opened it.

  Mrs. Barclay wrote a weekly column on everyone’s comings and goings. Busybodying, Hannah would have called it—she hated gossip—but those columns just might give me a clue to my mother.

  I dug through the papers and found the one for Thursday, December 11, the first issue that would have come out after December 7. Most of the news dealt with Pearl Harbor, of course, but the very first item in Mrs. Barclay’s column caught my eye.

  Hannah Spooner got the surprise of her life Sunday morning when she found a baby in the copper kettle out in her front yard. The baby weighs only three pounds but is doing well, Hannah reports.

  Hannah hadn’t ever told me I weighed only three pounds. I must have been born early. Which meant folks might not have even been able to tell my mama was going to have a baby just by looking at her. She might have just looked like she’d eaten a big Thanksgiving dinner.

  I went back through all the papers for 1941 and found Peddler Jenny mentioned three times—“Peddler Jenny was in the area on Wednesday,” that sort of thing—but the October 24 column finally gave me a clue.

  We extend our sympathies to Peddler Jenny on the death of her husband. The service was held in Barre.

  Had Peddler Jenny been so upset over the death of her husband, and scared, wondering how she was going to feed another child on top of the nine she already had, that she’d left me in Hannah’s kettle? Maybe I could find some answers in Barre, people who’d known her and might know where she’d gone. But Barre was over fifty miles away. I couldn’t exactly ask Hannah to drive me there. I’d have to take a train or a bus.

  I sighed. It was going to take money to travel around looking for my mama, and I didn’t have any. Maybe I could get Nadine’s mom to pay me for cleaning out their attic. Maybe Mr. Gilpin would give me a paper route. I didn’t have a bike, but I could deliver papers on Dolly, along with my other deliveries.

  “Blue!” Mr. Gilpin called down the stairs. “I’ll be closing up soon.”

  Had that much time passed already? Hannah was going to be wondering where I was. There’d be questions, and I’d have to make up some answers.

  I shoved the papers back into a pile and scrambled up the stairs.

  “Find what you were looking for?” Mr. Gilpin asked.

  I nodded, my face feeling extra warm.

  “You know, I never did believe those animals were stolen,” Mr. Gilpin said. “I think the operators of that circus were con artists and just said the animals were stolen to try to cheat us out of some money.”

  Oh.

  “Speaking of animals, I should have sent you home earlier,” Mr. Gilpin said. “That old horse might have a hard time seeing, now that it’s twilight. You’ll need the fireflies to light your way home.”

  What was that word Nadine had used, the one about fireflies and things that happen at twilight? Oh yes, cre-PUS-cu-lar.

  “What did you say?” Mr. Gilpin said.

  I ducked my head with embarrassment. Had I said that out loud?

  “Crepuscular,” I said. “Fireflies are crepuscular insects, but it’s not a very pretty word. Hannah calls the evening gloaming, but that’s not pretty, either. I think twilight sounds better.”

  Mr. Gilpin stared at me, and I wished the earth would just swallow me whole. What was the matter with me, rattling on about twilight and fireflies? Mr. Gilpin was going to think I was missing some marbles.

  The corner of Mr. Gilpin’s mouth curled up into a smile.

  “How’d you like a job, kid?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard right.

  “Ida Barclay’s going to be away right up until the celebration, visiting her daughter,” Mr. Gilpin went on. “I need someone to write her column while she’s gone. You want the job?”

  Working at the newspaper seemed like a way I might be able to find out more information about my mama.

  So I rode home as the newest reporter for the Monitor, all because of crepuscular.

  Reader’s Digest was right. It did pay to increase your word power.

  chapter 16

  First thing I did when I got home was tell Cat about my new job.

  “Maybe I’ll be a writer instead of a cowboy,” I told her.

  Cat finished off the milk in the bowl and cleaned herself. I guess the newspaper business didn’t interest her that much, but I was excited. I was going to be a reporter, like Lois Lane!

  That excitement lasted until the next morning, when it was replaced with panic. What did I know about writing a newspaper column? I couldn’t spell worth beans, and now I’d be a laughingstock in town. People would point and whisper behind my back.

  I rode into town thinking I’d tell Mr. Gilpin that I’d made a terrible mistake, that I really didn’t want to write the column, but somewhere between my house and the Monitor, I lost my nerve and ended up bringing home some of Mrs. Barclay’s columns that Mr. Gilpin pushed on me to read so I’d know what I was supposed to write.

  I made another decision, on the way home, one I was determined to keep. I was going to ask Nadine for help. She wrote for her school newspaper; she’d know what to do. No matter what she’d said to me, it was time to make up, and if Nadine wouldn’t make the first move, then I’d have to. All I had to do was remind Nadine how much fun we’d had over the years, how much fun we could still have this summer. We’d been friends for too long to let it all go to waste.

  My determination went up in smoke when I climbed the steps to Nadine’s camp. I felt more like I was making my way to the guillotine. My knees wobbled as I knocked on the door (which shows how nervous I was, because in all the years Nadine and I had known each other, we never knocked on each other’s door—we always just burst in on each other, like family).

  Nadine answered the door, and her eyes narrowed. I jumped in, quick, before she could slam the door in my face.

  “I’m a reporter for the Monit
or now,” I told her. “I thought you could give me some advice about my column.” If there was one thing Nadine liked, it was giving advice. But I didn’t tell her I hoped this job was also going to help me find my mother.

  Nadine seemed to take forever deciding.

  “Okay, you can come in,” Nadine said, and I followed her up to her room.

  I dumped the papers on Nadine’s bed.

  “You know, it’s just a gossip column,” she said, all hoity-toity. “It’s not like you’re a real reporter.”

  I knew she was only saying all that because she was jealous Mr. Gilpin hadn’t picked her to write the column, but it still made me mad. Here I was, being nice to her, and she kept on being mean. Why was I always the one who had to apologize, even when it wasn’t my fault? I picked up one of the papers and blinked fast so Nadine wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

  “Why’s it even called the Monitor?” Nadine asked. “Seems like a funny name for a newspaper.”

  I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t bothered to come over in the first place.

  “Of course, it isn’t even a real newspaper,” Nadine went on. “Not like the New York Times. When we lived in New York, Daddy always read the New York Times. Now he reads the Washington Post, but he still subscribes to the New York Times too.”

  I ignored her while I flipped through the pages for Mrs. Barclay’s column.

  “It’s right there, on the back,” Nadine said, snatching the paper out of my hands. If there was one thing Nadine hated, it was being ignored.

  Nadine scanned the column and snorted.

  “I told you!” she said, rolling her eyes. “This isn’t news. This column could put people to sleep!”

  I glared at her and snatched the paper back. I wanted to smack Nadine, but reading the column, I saw she was right.