In Sheep's Clothing

by Rett MacPherson

  Before I had the chance to answer, Aunt Sissy flew into a colorful description of the Gaheimer House and the gowns that I give the tours in and ended with an even more colorful description of my boss, Sylvia Pershing, and her sister, Wilma.

  “Oh, Aunt Sissy, I forgot to tell you that Wilma died.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, don’t that beat all. I honestly thought she and Sylvia were going to be the first immortal human beings,” she said.

  “Well, Sylvia’s still kicking. I think it would take a train to stop her.”

  “Well, nevertheless,” Aunt Sissy went on, “the Pershings were still a pair of great old ladies.”

  Roberta put her hand on her hip. “I’m so jealous,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You work in a big beautiful house with antiques and you have authentic reproduction dresses? I get four walls, my sweat outfits, and Hank the wandering can collector for company.”

  “Olin isn’t a tourist town,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d probably have better facilities, too. In New Kassel, that’s all we do. We survive and prosper on tourists, so we cater to that.”

  “Well, what can I help you find?” she asked.

  I pulled out my notebook, which I had shoved down in the back flap of my purse. I scanned my notes and then put it back. “You don’t have a microfilm reader here, so I’m assuming this is not where you keep things like census records.”

  “I’ve got a few in book form that some other volunteers and I transcribed one year. What year are you looking for?”

  “I’m thinking 1860.”

  “Yes, that’s one of the ones we have in book form,” she said. She pulled it off of a shelf behind her desk and handed it to me. “Anything else?”

  “Where would I get ahold of the census records for Greenup?”

  “At the library.”

  I nodded to Aunt Sissy. We needed to go to the library, then, if for nothing else than to get a look at the 1850 census for Greenup. “What about church records? I noticed that you’ve got two churches in town. Do you have their records here or are they at the churches?”

  “They are at the individual churches. I think they’ve been copied by the Latter Day Saints Library, so you can probably find them on-line now. Or at your local LDS Library. But since you’re here, I would just go over to the church and ask to see their records,” she said.

  “Great.”

  “Which church do you need?”

  “I don’t know. What kind of churches are they? I saw a Lutheran one when we came in.”

  “Yes, the other one is Catholic.”

  “Mmmm, I doubt that they were Catholic.”

  “Why’s that?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “She called him a parson in the book. I think even in 1858 if she were Catholic, she would have referred to him as Father or as a priest. I don’t think she would have called him a parson. So I’m thinking the Lutheran church would be our best bet. But if I come up empty, I’ll still check out the Catholic church,” I said.

  “The office at the Lutheran church is open from about ten in the morning to four in the afternoon,” Roberta said.

  “Great,” I said. “Oh, and land records. I need to find out who owned a specific lot of land.”

  “Do you know when it was bought?” she asked.

  “I want to know who owned Aunt Sissy’s land before she did.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Roberta said. “The Olsons owned it.”

  “No, I mean, all the way back.”

  She handed me a stack of books. “The land records we have transcribed,” she said. Roberta was proud of herself, smiling at my Aunt Sissy, happy that she could assist with my hunt. That’s the thing about us historians and genealogists. We get almost as much satisfaction helping others with their hunts as we do when we’re solving our own mysteries.

  I looked around the room and there were no other chairs, so I just opened the books on one of the glass cases and began scanning them. Roberta was correct: Kevin Olson and his wife, Belinda, had owned the property before my aunt.

  “So, you’re going to try to find the authoress of the novel?” Roberta asked.

  I looked at her quickly and then at my aunt. “You know about it?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Roberta said. “Sissy tried to figure it out herself, before calling you. She sort of enlisted all of our help.”

  “Who’s all?” I asked, and flipped a page.

  “Everybody in our quilting bee and prayer group,” she said. “Which is one and the same. We all get together and pray that our stitches hold.”

  I laughed, which was what I was supposed to do, and flipped another page.

  “I’m the youngest one in the group,” Roberta said. “Why don’t you come to our next meeting? It’d be nice to have somebody my own age in the group. I’m forty-one, and the next closest is … Diane. She’s what, about fifty?”

  Aunt Sissy nodded. “About that.”

  I did not slap the woman across the face for suggesting that I was forty-one. I was pushing forty, but I wasn’t there yet. Instead, I smiled and flipped another page, accepting the fact that I was no longer a spring chicken. It wasn’t the fact that I was not a spring chicken that bothered me. It was the fact that everybody else knew I was not a spring chicken. People treat you differently when you’re over thirty, and once you hit forty, it’s as if everybody just counts you out. Of course, revenge would be mine, because everybody’s going to get there, eventually. Probably the same thing that everyone older than me was thinking, too.

  “I’m not a very good quilter,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t have to quilt,” Roberta said.

  “I’m not a very good prayer, either.”

  “Oh, nonsense.”

  “No, seriously. I always think my prayers sound so stupid. So I don’t say them out loud if I don’t have to.”

  Roberta and Sissy both laughed. I was being serious.

  I stopped and looked at the names on the page. I had found the next entry to the land that was now my aunt Sissy’s. The Olsons had bought it from … the Hujinaks. “Hujinak?”

  “Yes,” Roberta said. “What about them?”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “Yugoslavian, most likely. There’s a large population of Slavs up on the range. They came in around 1900 to 1915 and worked in the iron-ore mines.”

  “Oh,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about. “The range?”

  “The great Mesabi,” she said.

  She said it with such matter-of-factness that I dared not tell her I still didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Anyway, some of them, if they had the money, would move farther south or west, either to be farmers or loggers. Depending on which area they moved to. This area was once a haven for loggers. All that white pine. But that’s all gone now,” Roberta said.

  “In other words, this Hujinak family came down from the range to be loggers or farmers?”

  “Most likely,” she said. “You can ask them. Good Lord, I think there were thirteen or fourteen kids in that family. Most of them are still in the area. The mayor is one of them.”

  “Yeah,” Aunt Sissy said. “Mayor Tom. I never call him Mayor Hujinak. I forgot that was his last name.”

  “Everybody calls him Mayor Tom,” Roberta said. “He goes to St. Catherine’s, owns a farm out on J highway. His daughter is a riding champion.”

  “Riding champion?”

  “Horses.”

  “Oh,” I said. I looked at Aunt Sissy. “You think I could talk with him sometime this week?”

  “I don’t see why not. Friendliest guy I’ve ever met,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Is the Lutheran church the church that you go to, Aunt Sissy?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “Is there a church historian or somebody that I could talk to?”

  “Mmmm, Lisa. She could probably help you
the most. Or even Diane.”

  I flipped a few more pages and put that book away. I would need the land records prior to 1930. “Where’s the courthouse?” I asked.

  “Oh, over in Cedar Springs,” Roberta said.

  I flipped through the pages of the next book until I found the Hujinak name. I love unusual names, because they are the easiest to trace. I felt like weeping for people who had to trace names like Jones or Johnson. Or Schmidt! Ugh. Or names that have other uses outside of last names. Like Acre, Justice, or Brown. Those are hard, too. Especially on the Internet. Put in the name Acre, and you’ll get all of these hits from people posting land that they want to sell. So a name like Hujinak is a godsend to a genealogist.

  “Okay,” I said and got out my paper. “Hujinaks bought the land in 1928 from … Wendell Reed.”

  “Don’t recognize that name,” Roberta said.

  “I wonder why the land stayed vacant so long,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Roberta asked.

  “Aunt Sissy said that before the Olsons bought the land it had stood vacant for a long time. The Hujinaks owned it the whole time. So why didn’t anybody live in it?”

  “I think Mr. Hujinak died in the late fifties, and his wife went to live with one of the kids and died in the early sixties. I never met her, but I remember my mother talking about her. I don’t know why it took them so long to sell it.”

  “Well, at any rate, they bought it in 1928.”

  “Just before the crash,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Yes, I noticed that,” I said. “A year later, they were most likely sweating bullets. Probably thought they were going to lose their farm.”

  I kept searching through the records and about ten minutes later found where Wendell Reed had bought the land in 1910. He had bought it from somebody with the last name Hendrickson. Twenty minutes later I had found the entry for the Hendricksons, who had bought the land in 1878. “Hey, eighteen seventy-eight,” I said.

  Aunt Sissy perked up and looked over my shoulder. “Who owned it?”

  “Uh … Roy Hendrickson bought it in 1878. Isn’t that when you said a new house was built?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He must have been the one who built it.”

  “Who told you that was the year a new house was built?”

  “Oh, um, the Olsons told me.”

  “They must have researched it some themselves,” I said.

  “What else did you find?” Roberta asked.

  “Well, the Hendricksons bought it from a James Rogers in 1878, who bought it in 1861,” I said. My stomach sort of flip-flopped. If our Swedish girl had moved into the house in 1858 and somebody else bought it in 1861, that meant that her family hadn’t lived there very long. That gave me a most disturbing feeling. I flipped more pages, more pages, and then I traced the lines with my finger until I found it. “Here it is. Karl Bloomquist.”

  Nobody said anything for a minute. We just sort of let the name hang in the air. “Karl Bloomquist bought the land in 1857. That’s right. Because in the novel, she says they lived with a cousin while the house was being built. They moved into the house in 1858.”

  “That’s weird,” Roberta said.

  “Why? What’s weird?”

  “Isn’t it strange that not one of those people willed their land to any of their offspring? I mean, how many other tracts of land would be sold time after time and never pass from father to son?”

  “That is pretty unusual,” I said. “Now that you mention it.”

  All three of us were quiet a minute. I tapped Roberta on the shoulder. “Hey, you’re all right, Roberta.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “Anytime.”

  “Oh, don’t make that offer,” I warned.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ll take you up on it,” I said and smiled. “And you may regret it later.”

  “Now what?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “Well, next on the list is the census. We know for sure that the Bloomquists owned the land in 1860 when the census was taken. So, now we need to find out if the Bloomquists had a son named Sven and a daughter.”

  “And whoever the daughter is, she’s the author of the book?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “It seems too easy,” I said. “But I guess so.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “But I’m no closer to finding the ending of the book.”

  “The ending of the book?” Roberta asked.

  “Yes, the novel has no ending. Aunt Sissy thinks I’m going to be able to find the end of the story by finding the author. I think she probably got bored and just didn’t finish it,” I said.

  “You haven’t finished reading it yet,” Aunt Sissy said. “There is no way that she could have just not finished the novel.”

  “Yes, something I must remedy tonight,” I said, thinking about the pages waiting to be read. “Guess I should open this census book and find our novelist.”

  “I can’t stand the wait,” Roberta said. “Open the darned book.”

  “Did you index it?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  I flipped to the index in the back and found the name Bloomquist. I found Karl and flipped to the page that he was listed for. “This can’t be right.”

  “What?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “Well, there are no Bloomquists on this page.”

  “What do you mean?” Roberta asked.

  I scanned the heads of households and none of them had the last name Bloomquist. Then it occurred to me. This was 1860; what if the fire had already occurred? Then the Bloomquists wouldn’t have had any place to live. They would be staying with somebody else. I scanned each household and found: Bloomquist, Karl. Age 43. White. Male. Born in Sweden. Occupation was laborer. Meaning that he was most likely a farmer but as a guest in somebody else’s home. A laborer.

  “Here he is,” I said.

  “Who is he living with?” Roberta asked.

  “What do you mean?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “If he’s in the index, but he’s not a head of household, that means he’s staying with another family.”

  “Well, who is it?” Roberta asked.

  “Johann Hagglund.” Most likely, at one time, the last name would have had the two little dots over the a, but a few years on the frontier and you just got the spelling that the census taker felt like giving you.

  “By himself? Where’s his family?”

  “His son, Sven, is the only one listed with him,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. We were that close to finding out who the author of the book was and then, boom, it was gone. The disappointment was indescribable. All three of us sighed.

  “Well, fiddlesticks,” Roberta declared.

  I just looked at her. Only my grandmother says fiddlesticks.

  “Now what?” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Now I check the church records. We know they were here.”

  “Yes, but if she wasn’t baptized or married or didn’t die during that time, she’s not going to be listed,” Roberta said.

  I didn’t say anything. Aunt Sissy knew what I was thinking. There was a reason that the Bloomquists were not in their home. Most likely it was the fire. And if the fire was truth, not just a myth, then the possibility of the Swedish girl meeting her demise in the cellar could be the truth, too. The fact that neither she nor her mother was listed with the father and the brother just made that possibility all that more likely.

  Roberta realized what we were thinking. “Wait. Now wait, I know what you’re thinking. But couldn’t she be living with somebody else? Maybe the Hagglund family didn’t have room for everybody, so they had to split up.”

  I checked the index for more Bloomquists, but there were none.

  “Not unless she and the mother changed their last names or moved out of the state.”

  “Well, spit fire,” Aunt Sissy said.

  I was going to have to teach these people how to curse.

  “Come on. I think the church rec
ords are our best bet.”

  Seven

  It was nearly noon before we made it over to the church. My stomach rumbled as if it hadn’t been fed in days. But I suppose that’s what happens when you eat breakfast before the sun comes up. I said nothing and just hoped that Aunt Sissy would hear my stomach growling and suggest lunch. It was a crisp day and I could smell the oxygen heavy in the air. The sun was golden yellow, everything was in early bloom, and it was on days like this that you thought, it can’t get much better than this.

  The Olin Lutheran Church was a white clapboard building, oblong, with a steeple. A newer part of the building sat off to the left-hand side—the office, I presumed. The cemetery began about two hundred yards from the back of the church, and there was a large field off to the right with picnic benches and lots of trees. A cluster of birch trees sat almost perfectly in the center of the field. Funny, at that moment I thought that I could have sat there beneath those trees all day.

  I grudgingly went inside the office part of the church, following closely behind Aunt Sissy. The office seemed dark, since we’d just left the brilliant sunshine just seconds before. “Well, Sissy. How are you?” I heard a voice say.

  “I’m fine. Lisa, this is my niece, Torie.”

  “Hi, I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “She’s my brother’s daughter,” she said. “Of course, we just all recently found out he has two daughters.”

  Lisa, a woman of about twenty-five years with bobbed blond hair, raised her eyebrows at that remark.

  “Very sweet girl,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Well, are you just sightseeing?” Lisa asked.

  “No, actually,” Aunt Sissy said. “We’re here to see the records.”

  Lisa raised her eyebrows again. “Records?”

  I interjected, finally. “We were wondering if we could see the baptism, marriage, and death records that you may have on file here?”

  “For what year?”

  “Oh, it would be like … well, when do your records start?”

  “The church was built in 1854. Our records start in 1854.”

  “Well, then, I guess, give me the records for 1854 to about 1861,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Come on.”