In Sheep's Clothing

by Rett MacPherson

  Aunt Sissy and I headed out of Olin to Cedar Springs in the noisy beast she called a truck. Aunt Sissy was quieter than normal, I think, due to the fact that nothing was turning out as she expected. Her investigation of the antiquated document had had a domino effect. Me getting punched in the eye was part of that effect. I really think she had thought that I would just read the diary, look up a few records, and know all the answers about everything, and nobody would be the wiser. Except her. And me. Well, that’s rarely the case with anything. As I have found out in the past.

  We were about six miles outside of Olin. The trillium was in bloom all along the floor of the forest and I could see the occasional white blossoms from the cab of the truck. The trees were tall and thin trunked, lots of birch and poplar, and of course the evergreens. All of a sudden Aunt Sissy slammed on the brakes and I instantly whipped my head around to see what had caused her to react so abruptly.

  About three hundred yards in front of us was a wolf.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said in a controlled voice.

  “What’s it doing?” I whispered.

  “It’s carrying roadkill off of the road.”

  “Ooooh, gross,” I said. I could have gone all day without knowing that. Just as Aunt Sissy said it, though, the wolf looked up and right at us.

  “It’s fresh roadkill. Looks like a deer,” she whispered. “This … I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  The wolf considered its options. Abandon the roadkill or finish its task. She decided to finish her task. I guess humans in a big metal thing didn’t seem so intimidating. Or maybe her empty stomach took precedence.

  “Why are we whispering?” I asked.

  “Hell, I don’t know. You started it,” she said in a regular voice.

  Just as the gray wolf got the deer to the edge of the road, two impossibly little heads peeked out from the bush. The wolf turned and chastised them. What was wrong with them? Somebody would see them. Get back where they were supposed to be. I could imagine every word. Because it was universal. It was exactly what I would have said to my young.

  “She’s got cubs,” I stated plainly.

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “You can’t kill this wolf,” I said.

  “I’m not going to kill anything. Except maybe you if you don’t stop telling me what I can and can’t do.”

  “You will be just as responsible if you just stand by and let somebody else kill her.”

  “Shut up already,” she said.

  “Isn’t there like a Crocodile Hunter for wolves or something? You know, call somebody and have them relocated?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You can’t—”

  “I said, I don’t know,” Aunt Sissy said. “I’ll check into it.”

  I watched the wolf struggle to drag the carcass into the bush and felt sorry for her. I flashed on a memory of me trying to get my groceries in the house, the bag ripping, Mary running through the mud in her new white tennis shoes, Matthew screaming because he thought I was leaving him in the car. I could relate. The wolf’s husband should have helped her carry their groceries. I couldn’t help but wonder where he was. It’s not like he had an office or a day job.

  Once the deer was off the road, Aunt Sissy crept by at about fifteen miles an hour, I guess in case one of the little ones jumped out on the road. I stared after them as long as I could, until the road wound in a sharp turn so that I no longer could keep them in my line of sight.

  And then I just sat there listening to the squeegee, squeegee, squeegee of the truck with my skin tingling.

  We rode along in our own little worlds. Finally, we came to a four-way stop on an open road. I could see for miles in either direction. Another truck sped down the road toward us from the opposite way. Aunt Sissy didn’t go. She just waited for the other truck. It was obvious the two drivers knew each other.

  “Tom!” she said.

  The driver of the other truck pulled up alongside us so that his driver’s window was even with ours. “Hello, Sissy,” he said. “How ya been?”

  “Can’t complain,” she said. “This is my niece, Torie O’Shea. The one I told you about.”

  He waved at me. He was a good-sized man from what I could see. About sixty-five or seventy years old, with a bulbous nose and a head full of thick blondish white hair. At least what I could see of his hair. He wore a cap that read Husband. Dad. Grandpa. Mayor.

  “This is Tom Hujinak,” Aunt Sissy said to me. “The mayor.”

  I waved back and he gave me a toothy grin.

  “My niece was wondering if she could talk with you,” Sissy said.

  “What about?” he asked. He checked his rearview mirror to see if anybody was coming. I turned around in the seat and did the same. All clear.

  “She wants to ask you about our house. You know, your house,” she said.

  “All right,” he said. “I was born there. I should be able to tell you something.”

  “Well, not now,” Aunt Sissy said. “Can she come by your office later?”

  “Sure. I’ll be there until five,” he said. “Unless I go fishing. Hey, is she related to the guy who’s in jail?”

  “Uh … yeah,” Aunt Sissy said.

  He nodded. “All right. Better get off the road. See you later, then,” he said.

  Aunt Sissy and I both waved and he waved and we drove on in opposite directions. After a moment Aunt Sissy said, “I could have called him and asked him that. I wanted to stall him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s gonna drive right by the spot in the road where the wolves were. I wanted to make sure that they had time to get safely into the woods,” she said.

  I smiled.

  Silence for a beat. “How far is Cedar Springs?”

  “Oh, we should be coming up on Cedar Springs in about a minute. Biggest town in the county,” she said. “It’s a happening place.”

  About a minute later, we drove into town and passed a sign that read CEDAR SPRINGS: POPULATION 10,647. Fast-food joints trimmed the main thoroughfare like a string of brightly lit and colorful beads. McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, and so forth. At least there would be no shortage of places to stop for lunch. The Cedar Springs High School sat on the left. Home of the Cubs. I smiled at that.

  Aunt Sissy maneuvered her way through town easily. “Where you want to go first?” she asked. “The library or the courthouse?”

  “Oh, uh … whichever’s the closest. Whichever is the easiest for you,” I said.

  “Hate it when people won’t tell me what they want,” she mumbled.

  She waved at somebody out in front of Will’s Feed and Seed and he waved back. Two turns, through a stop sign, and finally she pulled up in front of the courthouse. It was an old-fashioned courthouse, the kind that sat in the middle of a town square and had a clock and a bell tower on top of it. A monument to past wars stood proudly in the front courtyard. It boasted the names of all the people from this county who had served in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. I was surprised that it didn’t list all of the Civil War veterans. Turned out they were all listed in the main hall of the courthouse. That was a pretty good clue as to how old the building was. More than likely it was built when the Civil War was still fairly fresh in everybody’s minds and World War I had yet to happen.

  “Okay, what do you need?”

  “Uh, court records. You know, for murders.”

  “Right,” she said. She made a turn and went down a flight of stairs until we stood at the one and only door on the lower level.

  A few minutes later a clerk had ushered us into a room devoid of windows and natural light, full of dust, books, files, and more dust. I set my purse and my tablet on top of a filing cabinet and turned and looked at the books. I pulled out the one with the appropriate dates and turned to January 1859.

  “What will this tell you?” Aunt Sissy said.

>   “It will only tell me something if charges were actually brought against somebody. You know, if there was an actual court case. Otherwise, it will tell us nothing.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  A few seconds went by. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Maybe whoever it was went to court years later,” she said.

  “Then I’d have to know when that was to look it up. Otherwise, I could be standing here scanning each entry for a forty-year span,” I said.

  “Great,” she said.

  “Maybe I should have checked the newspapers first,” I said.

  “See, I asked you which you wanted to do first, but you wouldn’t answer,” she said.

  I just rolled my eyes.

  “Well, what else can we do here?” she asked.

  “We can check marriages and land records,” I said. “I know Roberta’s got land records at the historical society, too, but it won’t hurt to look at what I need here.”

  “All right,” she said. “That’s upstairs.”

  * * *

  “What land records are you looking for?” Aunt Sissy said.

  “I’m trying to figure out where Sven relocated, because then we might be able to figure out the area that Emelie Bloomquist is buried in.”

  “Ahh, I see,” she said. I pulled out the land records book and began to look by year. I figured that if Karl Bloomquist hadn’t died until later, he most likely had bought a new farm after the fire and the death of his wife and daughter. He was living with his cousins, the Hagglund family, in 1860 and sold his property to James Rogers in 1861. So I checked 1861 and 1862 to see if he had bought a new farm.

  “Yes,” I said. “Karl bought land in this county in 1861 in the Poplar Creek bottom. Do you know where that is?”

  “Mmm, I think it used to run right through Cedar Springs. But the creek dried up ages ago, if I remember correctly. You have to understand,” Aunt Sissy said, “the actual town of Cedar Springs was only about a fifth of what it is today, so a lot of the farmland surrounding Cedar Springs back then would actually be part of the town today.”

  “Right,” I said. “That makes sense.”

  “So now what?” she asked.

  “I want to see if his son Sven bought any land, as well. Let’s see, he would have been about twenty years old in 1865.” He did not purchase any land during that year, the year after, or the year after. But in 1869 Sven Bloomquist bought a hundred and fifty acres on the upper mouth of Poplar Creek. “It looks like Sven bought land that backed up to his father’s or at least close to it,” I said.

  “So Emelie might be buried there?”

  I shrugged. “Well, if it’s a McDonald’s parking lot now, we sure as heck won’t be able to find any marker. But at least we know they would have most likely attended church in Cedar Springs. Maybe she’s buried in the Lutheran cemetery there.”

  “Okay,” Aunt Sissy said. She looked confused for a moment. “So, why is Karl buried in Olin, if he moved out here to Cedar Springs?”

  “Probably because his wife was buried in Olin,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said.

  “I want to see the census for 1870. Now that I know for sure Sven owned his own farm at the time, he should be in it.”

  “Where’s the census?”

  “Well, I can either check the one at the historical society or I can check the one at the library, and since we’re headed to the library for newspaper articles, I may as well check there.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll buy you lunch first.”

  “Okay,” I said. “First I want to check the marriages. I want to see if Karl remarried and who Sven married.”

  I put away the land record book and got out the marriage record book. It was a huge brown volume, with yellowed pages and handwriting from another century in ink that had faded to sepia. “Oh, as usual, this is indexed by year and the groom’s name.”

  “Good, that’s what we need, right?” she asked.

  “Yes, but it always irks me how the women were considered as property. You know? Oh, why would we need to record a marriage under the bride’s name, for crying out loud? It’s not like she’s the important person in the marriage. You know? Just makes me angry.”

  I checked and there was no marriage record for Karl, so I assumed he never remarried. I looked all the way up to the year of his death and there was no marriage record for him. Sven, however, married in the summer of 1869, to a Marguerite Olson. He was twenty-four and she was nineteen. “Karl never married. Sven married in 1869.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s eat lunch.”

  “Wait, I want to check one more thing.” I got the land records back out and checked for the year that Karl had died. Sure enough, Sven had received his father’s land. I assumed there was a last will and testament for Karl that would probably be more specific. But since he never remarried and Sven was his only child, I really didn’t see the need to look it up. “So, Sven inherited his father’s land, which joined with his, and he ended up with a little over two hundred acres of pretty prime property,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good,” Aunt Sissy said. “Now let’s eat.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty hungry,” I said. “And if I don’t eat before I go to the library, I’ll have a severe headache.”

  Eighteen

  The Cedar Springs Library was fairly new, with sapling lining the sidewalk in front. Aunt Sissy and I had managed to eat lunch without once talking about the precarious predicament of my stepfather. We had scarfed down our pizza, guzzled soda, made a few passing comments about poor Anna Bloomquist’s life before heading to the library as quickly as we could. As Aunt Sissy pulled the truck into a parking space near the front entrance, she turned to me and said, “So, what’s going to happen to Colin, do you think?”

  “I have no idea. All I know is there isn’t much more I can do for him. Except check out Kimberly Canton, and I don’t really know anything about her or where to begin. Besides, she may have nothing to do with it all. You know her?”

  “Snooty bitch from Duluth,” she said, and turned off the engine. “Showed up here about three years ago, claiming to have some sort of right to the lake property or something like that. Then when nobody would believe her, she started letting money do the talking, and that worked a little better. She probably owns half of the land around the lake by now.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Do you know who the original owners of the lakefront property were?”

  “No, I wouldn’t have a clue,” she said. “Why?”

  “Well, maybe this is a family thing. Maybe she does have some claim to some of the land through her grandparents or something,” I said.

  “Maybe. Whatever it was, it was thrown out of court. That’s why she had to start buying it up.”

  We said nothing as we walked along the sidewalk and up the steps to the library. As we went inside Aunt Sissy turned to me, a tired expression in her eyes. “Far as I’m concerned, she can just take her long manicured fingernails and her fake boobs and go back to Duluth.”

  “Fake boobs?” I asked and laughed. “How would you know if they’re fake?”

  “They don’t jiggle and they point due north when she has to be at least thirty-five. They’re fake.”

  “Oh,” I said and laughed. “I hadn’t realized you paid so much attention to that sort of thing.”

  “Just gets my gall how people try to pass off being something they’re not. When you get to the pearly gates, you think God isn’t going to know what’s real on you or not? Huh? You think you get to take those fake boobs into heaven? Hell no, you show up the way God made you. Tell you, I’d hate to face the Almighty and tell Him that I wasn’t happy with what he saw fit to give me so I had to change it. No, sir, not me. Don’t want to go pissing off any deities, thank you very much.”

  And that is why I love my Aunt Sissy.

  The library was like most newer libraries. Neutral colors, not much natural light, and filled with
that wonderful smell of books. Not just the smell of books, but the smell of hundreds and hundreds of books. I wish I could bottle it. I found a librarian, told her what I needed, and she set me up with a microfilm reader and a huge filing cabinet filled with reels of microfilm and cards of microfiche.

  I checked the 1870 census and found Karl Bloomquist living on his land near the creek. He had an older native American living with him, who was listed as a laborer, and Karl was listed as a farmer. A few entries later was Sven and his wife of one year. Sven owned a mill on Poplar Creek, which might explain why he was in the biographical sketches book. He was a fairly important person in the community if he owned a mill. Farmers from miles around would bring their grain and such to him to have ground into flour or whatever, depending on the type of mill he owned.

  I copied down the information and then decided to check the 1880 census to see what his children’s names were so that I could make sure that Mayor John Bloomquist was indeed the son of Sven. I loaded the 1880 census and found Sven and his two children.

  I blinked my eyes and took another look. He had a daughter named Emelie. “Look, Aunt Sissy. He had a daughter and named her after his niece, Emelie.” I looked back at the screen.

  “And he had a son, John, who is most likely one and the same Mayor John Bloomquist,” I said. I wrote down his age in 1880 so I could check it against the age of John in the biographies. Then I noticed that he was listed first, even though he was the younger of the two children. Then I noticed just how old Emelie was.

  She was twenty years old.

  “What is it?” Aunt Sissy asked. “All the color just drained from your face.”

  “That’s not his daughter. That’s his niece,” I said.

  “What?”

  “We couldn’t find a tombstone for Emelie, because she didn’t die at two months of age like we thought,” I said. “Evidently she lived, and her Uncle Sven took her and raised her.”

  “But … why would he report her dead at the church?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But that makes no sense.”

  “Well, evidently he reported her dead so that people would think she was dead. Then he moved out of Olin to Cedar Springs and raised her as his own. The only reason I can think of would be to protect her.”