And then I saw it. I stopped frozen in my tracks, the hair rising on the back of my neck. At the edge of the woods was a pine tree. It grew straight for about two feet and then the trunk bowed to the left for another two feet and then grew straight again: the pine tree that grows crooked on the edge of the woods …
It couldn’t be. There was no way. I walked over to it and stopped when I got about a hundred yards from it. I looked up and down the row of trees. It was the only crooked pine tree that I could see.
I looked back at the house and hugged myself close. Could this be the crooked pine tree that the girl had written about? But then that would mean that this land was the backdrop for her novel, too. Not just the town of Olin. Which meant whoever wrote it had lived here.
Five
It’s just a crooked pine tree, I told myself. There must be hundreds of crooked pine trees in Minnesota. Right?
Right. Hundreds of them. I’m not sure how long I stood there and stared at that stupid pine tree, with its crooked trunk situated perfectly on the edge of the woods. Voices from the past swirled around in my head, and I just couldn’t shake the feeling that everything had just changed. Rudy’s voice brought me back to the twenty-first century, the here and now. I turned around in time to see him walking up behind me. The smile on his face was unmistakable.
He had caught a fish.
“You shoulda seen it, honey. It almost got away…” The smile faded from his face when he saw me. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“You’ve got that look in your eyes.”
“What look?”
“That look that says I’m going to lose a lot of sleep.”
“Oh, please,” I said. I headed back toward Aunt Sissy’s house.
“I’m telling you, you were standing there working your lower lip between your thumb and finger … like, like you do when you’re onto something.”
I laughed. “You’re so silly.”
“Do not call me silly. I might be a lot of things, but I am not silly.”
“Just hearing you say it makes you sound silly,” I said.
“D-did you see the way you did that?” he asked, walking along beside me.
“Did what?”
“Turned it on me. This conversation was a study of your behavior, not mine. And you just whipped it around and now I’m defending myself,” he said, snapping his fingers. “How do you do that?”
“Practice, I guess.”
“Well, stop it. Now, what was that look back there for?”
“I’ve discovered why Aunt Sissy asked me to come up,” I said. “Other than the fact that she wanted to see me and other than to give you a chance at fishing.”
“What?” he asked. “What is it? Is it bad? You look like it’s bad.”
“Well, you know how she said she wanted some help with something?”
He nodded.
“She wants me to find out who wrote a novel that takes place like a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“Oh, is that all? Just go to the library. They have all sorts of reference books about those sorts of things,” he said.
“It was never published,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. Then he stopped and turned to me. “Oh.”
“Yeah. It was left here on the property when they moved in and she wants me to find out who wrote it,” I said. “So, I’m going to be spending a lot of time reading and a lot of time behind microfilm readers, I suspect.”
“But nobody’s been killed, kidnapped, shysted, or shanghaied. Right?”
I punched him in the arm. “Right. But it’s never to late for you to succumb to an uncertain demise.”
He rubbed his arm. “All right,” he said. “I get the picture. Now, can I tell you my fish story?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Oh, man, it was just amazing … Why were you staring into the woods? Just now.”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Go ahead, tell me your fish story.”
And so all the way back to Aunt Sissy’s house he dazzled me with his fish story and how the little sucker almost got away—whatever it was, and when we made it to the front porch and he showed me his fish … well, it was just a fish. It was dead. It was harmless, and it didn’t look all that big. Maybe it had just been a clever fish. Either way, I was happy for Rudy that even though Colin caught three more fish than he had, he had caught the biggest. That was important.
“Does Aunt Sissy know that her front porch is now the home to dead fish?” I asked.
He put his hands in his pockets. “Well, sure. I guess.”
“Rudy O’Shea, you get those dead fish off of my front porch and out into the shed!” Aunt Sissy had appeared in the doorway like magic, out of the mists of her living room, with a giant fork in her hand and a scowl that would scare even the bravest of hearts. At that moment she reminded me of my boss, Sylvia. Sylvia, although twenty-plus years older than my Aunt Sissy, could just appear out of nowhere and bark commands that everybody seemed to follow. Even when you weren’t sure why.
I just smiled.
“I spent years getting these lilacs to grow, and they only bloom a few weeks, and I want to smell them, not your dead fish. Next time I’m just going to invite Torie.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Now!” she exclaimed and pointed off in the direction of the shed with her giant fork.
“Of course,” he said.
“You need some help with dinner, Aunt Sissy?” I asked.
“Yes, you can shuck corn and slice tomatoes.”
Which I did, while Rudy and Colin removed their fish to the shed and began to clean them. When they were finished, they both snuck inside through the front door and went upstairs to take their showers. I set the table, and all the while Aunt Sissy talked about her beloved cherry trees in the backyard. I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to hear about another cherry tree or how the birds loved to eat the cherries or how many bushels they yielded or canned or whatever. I wanted to know about something else.
“Did you find the crooked pine?” I asked.
She was taking the baked beans out of the oven and sort of stopped midway. Obviously she had found the crooked pine. She stood up the rest of the way and set the baked beans on a hot plate. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, come on. Don’t play games,” I said. “You found the crooked pine. The one she talks about in the novel.”
“We can’t talk about this during dinner,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t ask why. I assumed it had something to do with Uncle Joe. Either she didn’t want him to know, or he already knew and was upset by her obsession with it. But he had seen me reading the manuscript earlier at lunch and he hadn’t asked any questions. So I was assuming that he knew about it already and she just didn’t want to aggravate a sore spot between them. “But it’s not dinnertime, yet.”
She looked around quickly. “Okay, yes. The tree is the thing that really got me going. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it after that. When I saw that crooked pine, I got goose bumps all down me and it just made it seem … real.”
With that, Uncle Joe came in with the chicken on a big red, white, and blue platter. “Mmm, baked beans smell good,” he said.
“So does the chicken,” I said.
Aunt Sissy and I exchanged a knowing glance and just shut up. Colin came barreling downstairs within seconds of Uncle Joe coming in the door, and Rudy followed right on his heels.
Dinner was delicious and the talk around the table was mostly of Rudy and Colin’s adventures on the boat. “I’m all for going back out on the same lake tomorrow,” Colin said. “The fishing was good and the lake itself was just beautiful.”
“Yes,” Uncle Joe said. “Olin Lake was once described by the early settlers as the sapphire of the prairie. Of course, this isn’t technically prairie right here. We’re sort of on the edge of the prairie and the edge of the forest. Neverthele
ss, the lake was one of the things that even the earliest settlers recognized as an asset to their community. I think the historical society even has some photographs of sailboats and such out on the lake around the turn of the century,” he said, and took a bite of tomato.
“Oooh, neat,” I said. “Maybe Aunt Sissy and I can go to the historical society tomorrow and see them.”
“That would be right up your alley, that’s for certain,” Uncle Joe said.
“Hey, on the way back from fishing, Colin and I saw a bunch of people gathered up on the road. I just thought a deer had been hit by a car, but everybody seemed to be pretty interested in it, so it can’t have been roadkill,” Rudy said.
Uncle Joe swallowed. “Yeah, one of the farmers over in the valley lost one of his pigs.”
“Lost it?” I asked.
“Predator carried it off. They found what was left of it by the road,” Uncle Joe said.
“Don’t they have llamas?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, they do,” Aunt Sissy said.
“A llama isn’t going to work against a bear,” Uncle Joe said.
“You think it was a bear?” I asked. “You think a bear carried off a pig in broad daylight?”
“Well, I’m sure it wasn’t broad daylight,” he said. “And I’m not saying it was a bear. I’m just saying that a llama isn’t going to be able to fight off everything. They’re mostly good for coyotes.”
“Great,” I said.
“There’s no bear,” Rudy said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“It was a little pig,” Colin said.
“A little pig? What has that got to do with it?” I asked.
“Meaning that it was probably something little that killed it.”
“Oh, like a little bear?” I said.
He rolled his eyes.
“So what else do you have of historical interest in this town?” Colin asked. Colin could have cared less about historical things, but he knew I did. He was trying to get the subject away from bears. It was sort of sweet. Like he was actually worried about me being afraid.
Uncle Joe shrugged. “Well, there’s the historical society. There’s a little house that is set up like a frontier house. You can tour it. Gives you an idea of what life was like in the olden days. And then, we have a festival coming up at the Lutheran church,” he said. “They sell jams and apple butter and pies and things like that. They have wood carving and a strongman competition.”
“When is that?” I asked.
“I believe it’s this week. They do it every spring. From what I understand they’ve done it every spring since the church was built,” he said.
“Oh, that sounds like fun,” I said.
“Yeah,” Colin said. “I’d love to see the strongman competition.”
“That will probably be on the weekend,” Aunt Sissy said. “They save those big events like that for when people are off from work.”
“Sounds like I’ve got a few things to check out,” I said. “I’m not opposed to taking home a couple of jars of apple butter.”
“And where are you going to put it?” Colin asked. “We were cramped in the car as it was.”
“I’m sure if I pack it well enough, it can go in the back of the truck. Or if nothing else, I’ll put it under the seat,” I said. “Mom would be very hurt if I came back without some apple butter or blackberry jam.”
Colin turned to Rudy. “We have to get in all the fishing we can before the weekend,” he said. “I want to see the strongman competition.”
“Okay,” Rudy said. “Torie, what are you doing tomorrow?”
I looked at Aunt Sissy, whose expression did not change. “I think I’m going to start at the historical society,” I said. “That sounds interesting.”
Six
The next morning I awoke feeling that I hadn’t slept at all.
I’m not sure if it was the travel just catching up with me or what. I don’t sleep well in other people’s homes anyway, and every time I woke up, I found myself thinking about the Swedish girl and the anonymous novel. Then I’d doze off and wake up an hour later, still thinking about them.
Breakfast was at six in the morning, sharp. Aunt Sissy never varied breakfast or lunch times, and dinner only on special occasions. So I found myself scarfing down scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes with grit still in my eyes and my hair standing on end. Afterward, I helped Uncle Joe clean out the stables—a thrill a minute, I’ll tell you—and then took a shower. Nothing like horse crap imbedding itself in your nasal cavity to put you in a great mood. By the time I’d finished my chores, I felt like Laura Ingalls, waiting for Aunt Sissy at the foot of her steps to take us into town.
And I was wondering, why wasn’t Rudy or Colin having to shovel horse crap?
“You ready?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m actually looking forward to it.”
“Ha,” she said. “Be right back.”
She disappeared into the garage and then came back sitting behind the wheel of a beat-up pickup truck that spit and sputtered. She rolled the window down. “Get in. This is your limo for the day.”
I had to hike my pants leg to get up in the darn thing. It seemed as if the floorboard was four feet off the ground. The leather in the seat was ripped and the dash still had one of those push-button radios in it. The truck was evidently built before the invention of shock absorbers, and with every little rock, hole, or bump that Aunt Sissy drove over, I went up in the air—with plenty of hang time—and flopped back down on the seat. Then I’d hear squeegee, squeegee, squeegee. It was a veritable symphony of springs, pings, and squeegees all the way to town.
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.<
br />
“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.
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