A crate tucked out of sight at the opening to the mine, between a straggle of rocks and a half-filled ore cart, still held a couple of oversuits and hats and candles. On impulse, Clifford donned the gear. He might never do this again—enter a mine he still held title to. Striking a flint, he lit the candle and carried it past the barricades warning wanderers of danger should they enter the cave-like opening. It was not his intention to go far, just down one tunnel and perhaps squat at the top of a ladder and remember the cold and damp that crawled up his spine with each foot of descent into a shaft. The ladders were fifty or a hundred feet tall and hanging in sheer blackness. Even with a flint in his pocket just in case, his tiny candle would not take him far under the circumstances.
Clifford chose a tunnel and found the opening where the ladder hung, hearing in his mind the sounds of picks and hammers and ore carts and voices of men calling safety warnings to each other. He shifted position and climbed down three rungs, then four, five, and six and paused there, breathing in memories he did not expect to form ever again. Instead, he would hear the shop’s bell jangle and the cash register door shut hard and the wagon full of new stock pulling up to the rear door. Perhaps grandchildren would giggle in the aisles, and he would be ready with striped lollipops.
Cliff smiled at that thought and began to climb upward.
He missed a rung.
Dropped his candle.
Lurched.
Lost his grip on the ladder.
November 4, 1893. Everything changed that day in September. All of us could have been happy here. Should have been. The shop makes enough profit to see the potential Papa saw, and the house is well-built even if it is smaller than what we had become used to. Papa didn’t have the hammer of bankruptcy coming down on his head, and he chose thoughtfully in bringing Mama’s favorite furnishings here. Why was gratefulness so difficult? If it hadn’t been, perhaps he would not have gone.
Mama didn’t seem to care at all that Papa hadn’t come home for hours that day, that he missed supper when he promised to be home, that he wasn’t home when she retired. And I can’t seem to stop writing about it. Somehow he sacrificed and gave what he could to the charities in Denver for the miners who will never know their benefactor and also managed to take care of us. He filled the pages of this book, and all the others, with his own heart for doing both. And my heart breaks that he is gone from us so suddenly after making sure we will be all right.
I see in Loren’s face every day that he will never forget what it was like to go looking for Papa in the dead of night, find the mare, and realize he had gone down in the Missouri Rise. He strapped Papa’s crumpled, broken body to himself and carried him out of that place and brought him home.
We will never want to mine it now. Not ever. Not for all the riches in the world.
Missouri closed the journal as her mother approached.
“You should throw that thing out,” Georgina said. “All of them. If your father paid more attention to the real world, he’d still be alive, and we wouldn’t be in this destitute place.”
“Mama, please.”
“I never could depend on him.”
“That’s not true. He took good care of all of us.” Even now he was taking care of them. The store was doing well. Financially, they would be fine.
“I guess you’ll have to learn the hard way, Missouri. You just can’t depend on a man. They leave you in the lurch every time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jillian wiped up the last errant drop of coffee from around the machines, lined up a practiced aim across the breakfast bar, and tossed the sponge into the sink.
“So the second set of shelves will be finished today?”
“That’s the plan.” Nolan drained his mug, opened the dishwasher, and found space for it.
The doorbell rang.
“There she is, right on time.” Jillian turned to answer the front door. “Racking up the hours. What happens if she finishes all her required hours before the summer is over?”
“A positive dilemma, I’d say.” Nolan headed up the back stairs. “Send her right up.”
“Oh good, you’re here,” Tisha said when Jillian opened the door. “I found some information on Maclovia. I think it could be something.”
Jillian nodded. “Let’s see what you have.” It had only been two full days and three nights since she launched Tisha on the project of looking for the missing twin’s family, and they’d both been busy with other tasks. It seemed unlikely Tisha had reached a true turning point yet, but the last thing Jillian would do now was dismiss Tisha’s enthusiasm.
Tisha blew a bubble and smacked it, a habit Jillian had come to accept as more telling of nerves than defiance. Still, she hoped it might resolve sooner rather than later. The dining room table was blessedly clear, with papers sorted, folders labeled, and boxes readied for the shelves upstairs. Tisha confidently set up the dated laptop Jillian had loaned her and opened her green folder.
“I don’t have a way to print at home,” she said, “but I took lots of notes and made diagrams, and I can show you the website pages where I found information. I bookmarked them just like you showed me. And I took screen grabs and stored the links in the folders you helped me set up.”
“Sounds like you’re doing everything right.”
“I’m really trying to.”
“That’s good.”
“I stayed up like all night last night. Literally. I did not sleep.”
“Tisha, you have to sleep.”
“No, I don’t. I’d rather find Maclovia. I’m young. I have the rest of my life to sleep. So according to the original documents from St. Louis,” Tisha said, “Maclovia was born in 1939. You would think that would be a really unusual name.”
“Yes, I would, but sometimes I am surprised.”
“I figured it was a made-up name, but Google says it’s not.”
“Even if it was made up,” Jillian cautioned, “the question would be whether her parents made it up or the people who stole her made it up.”
“Like you said. The census. The counties around St. Louis. Southern and central Illinois. Perhaps eastern Kansas.”
“You found something?”
Tisha clicked a bookmark and a webpage opened. An infant named Maclovia with a birthdate identical to a sister named Ernestine was listed among several other children of two married parents in a rural area of Missouri.
“That’s her, right?” Tisha said.
Jillian nodded. “Yes, it absolutely could be. A twin named Maclovia in the right year. Good job! But we don’t know what happened to her after her illegal adoption, so we still have work to do.”
“They wouldn’t keep that name. It wouldn’t be like adopting a girl named Mary, who would blend right in. A Maclovia would stick right out if someone was looking for her.”
“Almost certainly.”
“But something sort of similar, maybe. Clover. What if the new parents were told the adoption agency was calling her Clover and liked it? It’s sort of cute.”
“It’s possible,” Jillian said. “But we don’t really know. There are going to be a lot of ‘what ifs’ in this work, Tisha. Adopting parents like to name their children themselves, especially infants. We have to be cautious about what ideas we get attached to.”
“But some ideas are going to pay off, right?”
“Technically, yes, obviously.” Jillian hesitated to let Tisha’s hopes keep rising unrealistically.
“Please, just listen. I was up all night checking every possible combination.”
“Combination of what?”
“Everything I could think of. All the things you told me to look for. Every variation I could think of. Combinations of variations.” Tisha’s brown eyes pleaded with wells of earnestness Jillian hadn’t seen in them before.
“All right. Show me.”
Tisha began spreading sheets from her green folder around, and Jillian leaned in to look at them as she listened to Tisha’s expl
anation. She asked questions. Tisha had answers. Thirty minutes later, Jillian conceded it was possible. Far from certain, but possible.
Maclovia might have become Clover, or Clover might have become Chloe. And Clover might have been renamed with something else still in the “purple” family. Mauve? Lavender?
Tisha produced the marriage record from publicly available vital records in Illinois of a Chloe Lavender Richardson and Thomas Louis Depue. The birth date was right, but how many baby girls in the Midwest were born on that date? A birthday alone didn’t mean anything, but in combination with her theory of how an adoptive name might have evolved—it was at least possible.
Property records indicated several moves around Illinois and Indiana.
Thomas Depue had died.
A Facebook profile Chloe obviously wasn’t using, likely set up by some other family member a long time ago to try to include her in social media, also showed the same birthday but without a year. However, it had enough links to trace to a son about Nolan’s age who looked like he’d be fairly easy to contact.
“Eli Depue,” Jillian said. “We’ll want to find a phone number, if possible. In my experience I get the best response that way. We can try reverse white pages for starters.”
Tisha pulled out another sheet that revealed ten digits in elegant shapes that would have made Georgina Brandt proud. “Can I call him?”
Jillian held up a hand. “You’ve done solid work, Tisha, but I’m afraid I’ll have to make the call. These conversations can be delicate and take experience.”
The girl’s face fell.
“I’m sorry,” Jillian said. “If it pans out, you will absolutely get all the credit.”
“Okay,” Tisha muttered, eyes downcast.
“Even if this is Maclovia, and she really did become Chloe Lavender, it’s only one side of the puzzle. If she or someone from her family is willing to give us DNA, we also need something to match it with—someone else related to the original family she was taken from.”
Tisha perked up. “I can work on that? Finding someone?”
“Yes, you may. You have the names of other siblings right there in the census. We can see if we can trace them down a generation or two and see if there are family stories of a missing aunt, and then we’ll know we’re onto something. The Maclovia and Ernestine you found had brothers, which is a big help, because their names are less likely to change than sisters who might marry and take their husbands’ names.”
Tisha nodded, eager once again. “Right. Women in my family don’t tend to get married, but other people do.”
“Tisha,” Jillian said, “you did good work. I mean it. If I found this kind of lead myself, I would definitely keep poking around to see if it solidified, so I’m going to follow up. But we have to be careful. We can be wrong because we don’t have a lot of information we can verify yet. Or even if we’re right, people may say no to getting involved, and we still can’t verify it. Other things could go wrong.”
Tisha rubbed one eye. “Yeah. I get it. But still. It’s like that story you told me about how you found Sophie’s family and they were happy. Maybe it’ll be like that.”
“Maybe.”
Nolan rapped on the bannister from the landing. “I thought we were building shelves today.”
Tisha looked up. “We are. I just had some questions. And I have one more.”
“What’s that?” Jillian said.
“How can I find out exactly where Clifford Brandt’s mines were? Maybe I could hike out to see where they were.”
“That’s tricky,” Jillian said.
“Agreed.” Nolan came down the stairs and crossed the living room into the dining room. “But the one person in this town who knows the most about mines is Leo Dunston.”
“The man at the Inn at Hidden Run?” Tisha said. “Where we were the other night?”
“That’s him. In that very room, as a matter of fact. He has a couple of shelves of books about mining history in the region. Maybe he can help us—after lunch. Let’s get these shelves up.”
“Cool.” Tisha nodded. “Then we can all take a hike and find my family history.”
“Jillian,” Nolan said, “why don’t you give Leo a heads-up?”
She nodded. Her list of calls seemed to grow with every idea Tisha had.
Eli Depue.
Leo.
And Drew. She’d hoped to have him to herself this afternoon, but Tisha had swung from one extreme to another in her attitude. Defiant, disinterested, and distracted had morphed into enthusiastic, engaged, and enquiring.
Leo likely wouldn’t know where Clifford’s mines were, but he would relish being asked. And Drew was always game for being outdoors.
In her office, Jillian dug into what little they knew about Clifford Brandt, making notes on a narrow-ruled yellow legal pad.
Moved from Denver 1893.
Owned the mercantile.
Owned mines.
Lost the mines?
Father of Decorah and possibly others.
Act of generosity in Denver toward miners. Georgina disapproved.
Died 1893. Cause of death?
She tapped the space bar of her computer to wake it up and opened an academic search engine to do some serious probing for information on Clifford Brandt. After an hour, though, she hadn’t found much. He worked for Horace Tabor, who was widely known to have lost his fortune in the 1893 economic recession that hit the Colorado mining industry especially hard because the US government ceased purchasing vast quantities of silver on a monthly basis after making gold the sole currency standard. It was reasonable to surmise Clifford Brandt also lost his livelihood in the industry. In a few newspaper clippings, he was also associated with social ministries of the People’s Tabernacle, a large church in Denver that cared for the poor on an ongoing basis and organized additional efforts to provide for thousands of unemployed miners. An especially generous gift, known as the Belonging Bequest, was designated to help former miners who wished to leave Denver for other parts of the country do so with adequate food, clothing, and cash to reach destinations where they could be reunited with family members or establish themselves in locations with more promising employment than Denver could offer after the collapse of silver mining.
She found no mention of Brandt’s family members or what became of them after he left Denver.
It wasn’t much, but Jillian printed off the pages she found and slid them into a green folder to give to Tisha. Certainly this was a Brandt who was far from bitter and angry.
Eli Depue didn’t answer his phone—likely because her number was not one he recognized—and Jillian left a calm, organized message of a sort she had become accustomed to leaving strangers in her line of work.
Leo launched into a lecture on mining on the phone, which was only cut short by Nia taking his phone away from him and assuring Jillian they’d be ready for the post-lunch visit.
And Drew. Sweet Drew. Accommodating Drew. Of course he would meet them at the Inn and gladly go for a mountain hike if that’s where the afternoon’s agenda took them.
“A registry? Not exactly,” Leo said, when they gathered in his library later to see what was on his shelves. He reached for a sheet of paper and jotted a website. “Try this, and you might find what you’re looking for if you know the name of the mine.”
“But I don’t,” Tisha said, “just the name of the owner.”
“In that case”—Leo pulled a slim binder off a shelf—“I downloaded this document from the Denver Public Library site. It’s a sort of index of the owners of the mines that also gives the names of the mines.”
Tisha eagerly flipped the pages. “There are hundreds.”
“Just look for Clear Creek County,” Jillian suggested.
She nodded and kept flipping. “I don’t see his name.”
“Are you sure this is everything?” Nolan asked.
“I didn’t create it,” Leo said, “but it came from the Denver Public Library and covers the
whole state.”
“Then why isn’t Clifford Brandt on it?”
“There could be several reasons. Maybe he gave up and abandoned his claim very early. That happened with unpatented mines.”
“What’s an unpatented mine?” Tisha asked.
“It means the owner essentially leased the land from the federal government and only owned the minerals that came out of it—if there were any. If the mine was a bust, or the mine owner couldn’t afford to keep going, they simply walked away.”
“Could someone else make a claim?”
“Theoretically, once it was declared abandoned,” Leo said. “Then there’s the reality that most mines started as claims by individuals on fairly small pieces of land that they scraped together the money for. But a mining magnate like Dumont or Tabor would buy up the small claims, which might or might not pay off for individuals, and put together larger parcels that would be more economical to mine and get the ore milled. The magnate would have a better shot at being profitable than the little guys. And if they started making money, then outside companies would be interested in gobbling up huge parcels. Now those guys would be more interested in actually owning land.”
“Kind of like how a start-up without a lot of money can’t really compete with what Google and Facebook and Amazon have become?” Tisha asked.
Leo pointed at her but looked at Nolan. “Now, she’s quick. Some things about business never change.”
What You Said to Me Page 21
