A Year on Ladybug Farm #1

by Donna Ball

  “I don’t know what you could have told him,” Bridget said, “except to go home. And knowing what we do about his home, I wouldn’t feel right about that.”

  “Me either. That’s the problem.” Lindsay sighed. “I’m a teacher. I’m trained in crisis intervention. I should know what to do.”

  “I’m a mother,” Cici said glumly. “I’ve lived in a constant state of crisis for twenty years. And I still don’t know what to do.”

  Lindsay leaned across and clinked her glass with Cici’s.

  “Richard’s right, you know,” Cici said after a moment. “I can’t make Lori come home for Christmas if she doesn’t want to. She’s over eighteen, an adult.”

  “I’d love to know who decided that,” Bridget said.

  “Some man, probably.”

  “Up until about four hundred years ago,” Lindsay pointed out, “boys in Europe were considered adults at age thirteen.”

  “Yeah, that was when they only lived to be twenty-five.”

  “Before dying of syphilis,” added Cici.

  “In some tribal cultures today, girls can get married at age nine.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You shouldn’t be allowed to call yourself an adult until you prove yourself to be one.”

  “By building a log cabin?”

  “Or making a quilt?”

  “Or going to war?”

  “Or having a baby?”

  And Lindsay said quietly, “Or living in the woods all by yourself because you’ve got no place else to go?”

  Bridget said, rocking gently, “Our children are so very lucky.”

  Cici sipped her wine silently for a time. Then she said, “I don’t think you should be allowed to be an adult until your mother says you can.”

  The other two laughed softly. “I’d vote for that.”

  “Me, too,” Bridget said. “I would have emancipated my two at age twelve.”

  Cici said, “What if she doesn’t want to come home?” “What if,” Lindsay said abruptly, “we let him sleep in the dairy?”

  Cici said, “What?”

  And Bridget said, “Who?”

  Cici said, “There’s no heat in there!”

  “It’s better than what he’s got now.”

  Bridget added, “What about your art studio?”

  “It would be just for a little while. Until he finds something better. We’d take it out of his wages.”

  “Heaven knows, there’s plenty for him to do around here,” Bridget admitted.

  “He’s an awfully good worker,” Lindsay agreed, a little anxiously.

  “I have to admit, I’d sleep a lot easier myself, knowing he wasn’t freezing to death out there in the woods,” Bridget said.

  “Maybe we could even get some space heaters out there,” Lindsay said.

  “I say we do it,” said Bridget.

  They both looked at Cici.

  She said, choosing her words with obvious care, “This isn’t the 1920s, you know. You can’t just pick up a hobo off the road and let him sleep in your barn.”

  “I think if he was a serial killer he would have done something about it before now,” Lindsay pointed out.

  “And it’s not like we don’t know him,” Bridget added, “or that no one in the community knows him. He’s a good kid. Kind of,” she had to add, honestly.

  “We’re aiding and abetting a truant and a runaway. That’s got to be illegal.”

  “Like keeping a wild deer in a pen isn’t?”

  Cici shrugged uncomfortably because the pen, after all, had been her idea. “That’s just temporary.”

  “So is this,” Lindsay insisted. “Besides, I can get him back in school, I know I can. All I need is a little time.”

  “Sounds like a big project to me,” Cici said. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

  Lindsay said nothing, and neither did Bridget. This was one contingency—unlike pets—that was not covered in their joint venture agreement, but they all knew it must be a unanimous decision.

  At last Cici sighed, shook her head, and said, “Oh, why not? We already adopted a dog, a flock of sheep, and a deer. What’s one more?”

  Bridget grinned and raised her glass. “This is starting to feel like a real home.”

  “Or a zoo,” muttered Cici.

  Lindsay sank back in her chair, her broad smile all but lost in the shadows. “I’ll tell him in the morning.”

  But in the morning, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground, and Noah was gone.

  16

  In Which Ghosts Come in from the Cold

  They did the responsible thing. They reported the boy missing. They called everyone they knew to make inquiries. The only response they received was surprise at their concern. As it was explained to them over and over again, this was the way he lived. There was nothing for them to worry about. He’d turn up again sooner or later.

  Finally even Lindsay had to admit defeat. “Damn it,” she said, pushing her hair away from her face with both hands in a gesture of utter frustration. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

  “We’ve done everything we can,” Bridget reassured her gently.

  “I know that,” Lindsay replied. “Just . . . damn it.”

  Cici said, “We paid him close to two thousand dollars over the summer. What did he have to spend it on except cigarettes? If he saved even part of it, he should be okay until he gets another job.”

  Lindsay managed a dry smile. “He probably used it to buy a ticket to Florida. He’s hanging out on a beach somewhere right now.”

  “In which case he’s better off than we are,” Bridget observed.

  Cici said, “He has a father, Lindsay.”

  “A father who didn’t even know he was missing.”

  “There’s really nothing more we can do.”

  “I know,” agreed Lindsay heavily. “It’s just . . . a shame.”

  There was nothing anyone could add to that.

  With Noah gone and winter breathing down their necks, there was more than enough to occupy their attention, and very little time left over for brooding. They spent two entire days filling bushel baskets with pecans and black walnuts, then couldn’t face the prospect of shelling them. Bridget came up with the idea of passing them around to all the neighbors who had shared garden produce with them, but that still left almost a bushel of nuts for them to dispose of, which Bridget decided to store in the barn.

  “They’ll attract rats,” Cici warned.

  “Good,” said Bridget. “Then we won’t have to shell them.”

  Keeping the house heated was almost a full-time job in itself. Every morning a day’s worth of wood had to be brought inside and distributed between the fireplaces and the big furnace in the cellar. Four times a day, someone had to go downstairs and load more wood into the furnace, and they devised a rotating schedule for furnace duty so that the chore was shared equally. Although at first they had enjoyed the romance—and the warmth—of keeping a fire going in the kitchen and living room fireplaces all day, they soon found it was easier to simply put on another sweater. The charm of carrying armloads of wood upstairs to their bedroom fireplaces faded fast, and reminded them that this house was built in an era when everyone had servants.

  The issue of servants was raised more than once as the shorter days forced them to spend more time inside and to notice, as they had not when most of their time was spent on the porch or in the yard, just how much work it took to clean a house that size. Dust accumulated almost as soon as it was wiped away, windows grew foggy from the invisible ash that the wood furnace circulated, and simply mopping all the floors was a full day’s job.

  Additionally, they each had projects that they were anxious to finish before winter settled in full-time. Cici had finally finished restoring and regrouting the tile in the sunroom, and spent her mornings (when it was too cold to paint) cutting and nailing trim and her afternoons (when the sun had
heated the room so that the paint wouldn’t thicken) carefully painting around the 152 divided window-panes. It was so cold in her workshop that sometimes she would have to dash inside, strip off her gloves, and hold her hands over the fireplace or the kitchen stove until the circulation returned to her fingers and she could hold the tools again.

  Lindsay took on the completion of her art studio with a determined ferocity that both impressed and alarmed the other two. She hired Farley to run an electrical line to the building, and Sam to install a series of baseboard heaters. Cici had been right about there being a water line already serving the building, but it had broken long ago. Rather than hire a plumber to dig up the semifrozen ground and make the repairs—a process that could take weeks—Lindsay hauled bucket after bucket of soapy water from the house to scrub the grimy windows and scour the floors. On one memorable occasion, she even climbed up on the roof to scrub away the years of accumulated muck from the skylights while Cici and Bridget held the ladder and passed up cleaning supplies and called up words of advice and concern.

  She hung fluorescent shop lights from the rafters and whitewashed the dark wood walls. The interior fairly sparkled with bright winter light. She hung hooks on the walls to hold her tools and built shelves for her supplies. She moved in easels and rolls of canvas and paint boxes and art books. It was with a sense of almost defiant satisfaction that she began stretching and priming canvases. She had moved here to paint, and paint she would.

  Bridget turned the small sitting room off the kitchen into a sewing room, and set about designing draperies for the tall front windows. She had found a scrap that wasn’t too mildewed in the box of fabric they’d uncovered in the dairy loft, and sent it to Paul in Baltimore. He had been able to find a modern-day equivalent of the rose damask that was far more practical and much less expensive than the original, and shipped twenty-five yards. Now that everything had been preserved that could possibly be preserved, Bridget had time to begin the painstaking process of measuring, hemming, lining, and pleating the fabric into draperies.

  Farley brought a dozen pumpkins when he came to run the electrical wire to Lindsay’s studio, and the women spent an afternoon carving jack-o’-lanterns and setting them up to line the front steps, and another afternoon turning the leftovers into pumpkin pies.

  And that was where the mystery began.

  They baked four pies. Two they wrapped and put in the freezer. Another they sent home with Farley. Another they enjoyed for dinner—or at least they enjoyed three pieces of it. When Bridget went to cut herself a slice for lunch the next morning, the entire pie was gone.

  She would not have thought much of this—although it did seem odd that Cici and Lindsay could finish off an entire pie between breakfast and lunch—if it hadn’t been for the ham. Bridget baked a small ham for dinner with the spiced apples they had preserved from their own tree. The next day, they all enjoyed ham sandwiches for lunch, and Bridget decided to use the leftovers in a casserole for dinner. But when she went to get the ham that evening to prepare the casserole, there was no sign of it—not even the plate upon which it had sat.

  “I think it’s the ghost,” Lindsay said, when Bridget told the story. “It left us presents all summer, now it’s taking some back.”

  “The ghost giveth and the ghost taketh away,” Cici agreed. “I just wish it would give back the wood-handled screwdriver I left in the sunroom. That was my favorite one.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Bridget produced the screwdriver from her jeans pocket. “I used it to pry open a stuck drawer. And you didn’t leave it in the sunroom, by the way, you left it in the pantry.”

  Cici accepted the screwdriver with an odd look. “I haven’t been in that pantry since we moved in. Are you sure that’s where you found it?”

  “Okay, this is starting to get weird,” said Bridget, and Lindsay hummed spooky music under her breath.

  “Maybe you accidentally tossed out the ham when you were clearing the table,” Cici suggested.

  “And maybe you were sleepwalking in the pantry,” Bridget said.

  They looked at one another for a moment, baffled. And so they remained, until the night of the mouse.

  Cici was just snuggling into bed in her flannel pajamas, glasses perched on the end of her nose, breathing a sigh of sheer pleasure as she turned the first page of a brand-new issue of Home Remodeling and Decor magazine, when there was a tap on her bedroom door. She looked up as Bridget poked her head inside. Her eyes were big.

  “I think there’s something in my room,” she said, half whispering.

  Cici removed her glasses. “You think? You don’t know?” “It’s making noises,” she said urgently. “It might be a mouse. Will you come check?”

  Cici said. “Me? I don’t know anything about mice.”

  Lindsay’s face appeared at Bridget’s shoulder. “What’s going on?”

  With a last longing look at the magazine, Cici tossed aside the covers and thrust her feet into slippers. “Bridget has a mouse.”

  Lindsay grimaced and made a small eek! sound.

  “I told you storing those nuts would attract rats,” Cici said as they crossed the wide hall to Bridget’s room.

  There was alarm in Lindsay’s voice. “Rats? I thought you said a mouse.”

  “Nuts in the barn don’t cause mice in the house,” Bridget said firmly, but she didn’t look as confident as she sounded as she eased open the door to her room.

  The three women stepped inside, standing carefully away from baseboards where mice liked to run, and looked around. Bridget’s room, with its cabbage rose wallpaper and lace-trimmed counterpane, was quintessentially Bridget. There was a Queen Anne writing desk and a silk wing chair with a pie table drawn up before the fireplace. Neither one hid a mouse. There was a gorgeous rose-patterned wool rug—which once had been the centerpiece of her formal living room—anchoring a brocade chaise and a skirted lamp table. Lindsay bent to peek under the chaise, and Cici flicked aside the ruffled table skirt. No mouse appeared.

  Suddenly Bridget lifted her hand. “Listen!” she whispered.

  Lindsay said, “I don’t—”

  And then everyone heard it. A squeaking, shuffling sound, followed by what sounded like a basketball bouncing directly overhead. All three sets of eyes turned toward the ceiling.

  “That’s no mouse,” Lindsay said softly.

  “It’s in the attic,” Bridget whispered.

  “Could be a raccoon,” said Cici, “or a possum.”

  Bridget said, “We can’t just let it stay there.”

  Lindsay looked uneasy. “Why not?”

  This time the sound they heard was more of a rhythmic thumping, occasionally punctuated by a crackling, crunching sound, like something trying to chew or claw its way through the ceiling. Bridget’s eyes were filled with horror. “Because I can’t sleep in here, that’s why!”

  “You can sleep in my room,” Lindsay offered.

  “Good. Glad that’s settled.” Cici turned to leave the room, but Bridget caught her arm as something clattered overhead, louder than any of the sounds that had occurred before.

  “Cici, we can’t just ignore that!”

  “Well, what do you want me to do?”

  Bridget scrambled in her nightstand and came up with a flashlight, which she handed to Cici. “Go up and have a look?” she pleaded.

  Cici looked at her for a moment, then snatched the flashlight away. “Why do I have to do all the hard stuff?” she demanded.

  “Because you’re the bravest,” Bridget said.

  “And you know how to use tools,” Lindsay added.

  “We’ll come with you,” Bridget added quickly, clutching Lindsay’s arm.

  Cici gave the two of them a withering look. “On one condition. If it is a raccoon, we are not adopting it.”

  “Promise.”

  “Absolutely.”

  On the way out of the room, Bridget grabbed an umbrella from the closet—“For self-defense,” she explained—and they ma
de their way up the attic stairs in close formation. Three steps from the top, Cici stopped suddenly. “The light is on,” she whispered, looking around at them with a question in her eyes. “Did either of you—?”

  Both shook their heads adamantly. And just then there was another creaking, scraping sound, like someone moving furniture.

  “Oh my God,” Lindsay breathed. “It is a ghost!”

  Bridget and Lindsay, melded together as one, would have fled back down the stairs at that moment had Cici not grabbed the belt of Bridget’s robe. “This was your idea,” she hissed. “Come on.”

  Inch by inch, they crept to the top of the stairs.

  Nothing had changed since their last visit. A single bare bulb with a pull string switch hung from a rafter in the center of the room, spreading a feeble pool of light toward the shadows of the vast space. Slowly, Cici swept the beam of the flashlight across those shadows. Already they had discovered there was nothing worth exploring in the space—a few cardboard boxes filled with things like aluminum cookware and moth-eaten sweaters, a picnic table, some folding chairs. Except that now one of those chairs was unfolded in front of the back windows, and upon it stood a person.

  Lindsay’s hand clamped down hard on Bridget’s. Bridget’s nails dug into Cici’s arm. Cici gasped and dropped the flashlight. All three of them dived to the floor to try to rescue the light, and it was Lindsay who found it first. Cici grabbed it from her and aimed it with both hands toward the window. The figure on the chair held a spray bottle in one hand and a cloth in the other, and as they watched in disbelief, she sprayed solution on the window, then wiped it clean with smooth, deliberate strokes. It seemed to take forever. And the women, suspended in the moment, felt as though they had stumbled down the rabbit hole.

  At last the figure on the chair stepped down stiffly, holding on to the windowsill for support, and turned to face them. “Ya’ll sure have let the place go, ain’t you?”