In Sheep's Clothing

by Rett MacPherson

  Were they both paranoid? Or were they both feeling an evil that hadn’t yet taken shape?

  I couldn’t tell.

  I rubbed my eyes and sighed heavily.

  Flipping the pages back and forth, I found the entry where her mother cried all day and fretted about the house in search of something she had misplaced but couldn’t seem to remember what it was that she had misplaced, just that she had lost something. I checked the pages before and the pages after. The entry fell between the death of Konrad Nagel and the death of Isaac Nagel. Sven left for several days after Isaac was found hanging in the barn. I didn’t think any of this was necessarily significant, I just wanted to be doing something. Three days before Konrad was murdered, Anna had gone to church with her father. She talked of how “the parson” kept looking right at her every time he said the word “sin.”

  I just held my head high and patted my stomach, for I had only done what all of God’s creatures do … given love to the one I love.

  Her father, Karl, had gone into Cedar Springs on business two days later, and Anna mentioned how she hoped he would bring back a nice new cotton cloth for making dresses. She had requested a plaid. She never said what type of cloth he brought back or that he had brought any at all.

  Nothing. There were no real outbursts or anything obvious, other than her mother’s odd behavior, but Brigitta had behaved oddly throughout most of the diary, so that was hardly anything.

  It was not lost on me that Anna Bloomquist never mentioned Isabelle Lansdowne. Not once. Not by name, not by relationship to Isaac. Nothing.

  I leaned back and closed my eyes, swaying myself back and forth in the office chair. Something floated in on the wind, through the window. Faint at first.

  I stopped moving.

  Then the sound lifted with the wind, growing louder and louder, until the howl of the wolf was just outside the window, maybe three or four hundred yards away. Just on the edge of the trees. The hair raised on the back of my neck and arms. I opened my eyes and strained to see out the window. Of course, it was dark outside and light inside, so all I could see was the blackness of the screen and the reflection of light in the upper part of the window.

  At first I just listened. Then I realized that if I could hear it, so could Uncle Joe and any number of armed citizens within a mile. I all but ran out of the room and down the steps. Colin stopped me at the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, a remote control in one hand and a root beer in the other.

  “I’m going outside,” I said. “You may be married to my mother, but you’re not my father. You can’t stop me from going outside.”

  “No,” he said.

  “What do you mean, no?” I asked, incensed. “Move it or lose it, buddy.”

  “What do you think you’re going to accomplish by going out there? You think you’re going to go out there and tell the nice puppy to please shut up? Huh?”

  “Colin, I have to go out there.”

  “Why, so you can get yourself shot?” he asked. “Think about what you’re doing, Torie. You’re going out into the dark, knowing that the entire farming community is going to shoot that wolf when they find her.”

  Well, it hadn’t seemed like such a stupid idea until he put it that way. I looked away, frustrated. “I can’t let her die.”

  “What are your alternatives?”

  “I don’t know, but there should be one.”

  “The wolf won’t listen to you. It’s not going to stop making noise because you want it to. Its nature is to howl at the moon. Its nature is to be the hunter. If that brings it into harm’s way, there’s not a whole helluva lot you can do about it.”

  “But that’s not fair,” I said. “There should be something I can do. I can go out there and scare it off.”

  “Maybe. But you might scare it off to some place even worse. You might be scaring it right into the hands of the people who want it dead.”

  “Yes, but it’s against the law to kill a wolf. It is a protected species.”

  “It’s against the law to kill humans, too, but people still do it.”

  “Whatever” I said and stormed off.

  I couldn’t sleep all night, because I kept waiting to hear the sound of a rifle firing. It never happened, at least not within a close enough range that I could hear it. I tossed and turned all night, smelling the fragrance of lilacs waft in through the window on the constant, steady breeze of the night. I couldn’t help but think about what Colin had said. About how it was against the law to kill humans and wolves, but people still did it. The sun rose, bright and crisp, and I was overcome with the feeling that all I wanted to do was go home.

  Twenty-one

  I was outside before the rest of the house was even awake. I just could not lie in bed any longer. Rudy was snoring away as I slipped out of the room. For the longest time I sat on the steps of the front porch and listened. I rarely do that. Just sit and listen. The birds were all chirping and flitting about the front yard. Somewhere in the distance I heard a hawk of some sort. I wasn’t sure what kind of hawks Minnesota had, but I could tell a raptor’s call when I heard it. The horses neighed and moved about in their stable, and every now and then the trees would rustle from a gust of wind. The smell of cedar would whoosh down out of the trees and wrap around the front porch, enveloping me in a coniferous hug.

  Something was bothering me.

  But I hadn’t a clue what it was.

  I could feel that little tugging at the back of my mind that pulls me in a different direction than I ever intended to go. Or that pushes at the back of my mind and makes me keep going, even though I don’t have a clue as to why.

  Anna Bloomquist could have sat here and done the very same thing at one time. Maybe she did it the morning of the fire. She had been seventeen. I thought about my family and my children. I thought about how I get so lost in carrying out the everyday events that sometimes I don’t stop to think about the everyday events. Rachel had a choir concert last month, but did I really stop to listen to the songs she sang? Mary had a soccer game the day before we left for Minnesota. Did I pay attention to the game? And through the mass of chores of laundry and housecleaning and working at the historical society, did I really stop to understand the intricate workings of my two-year-old son’s imagination? And did I ever give Rudy enough attention, or did we just function?

  Anna Bloomquist paid attention. Now, maybe that was because she was seventeen and things always seem more intense when you’re seventeen. But maybe not. Maybe that was the person she was. And at the time she wrote her diary, she really paid attention to the world around her. The color of the sun as it rose and the kaleidescope that it caused along the surface of the snow. I suddenly felt that I could learn a lot from a girl who had lived a hundred and fifty years ago and never even made it to the age of eighteen. And I was suddenly humbled by that.

  In light of everything that had happened, I thought Rudy and I should head back home to Missouri and our nice, safe, boring river town of New Kassel. Okay, well, maybe it wasn’t boring, but it was home. And home was comforting right now. Colin could always take a plane when Sheriff Aberg gave him permission for him to leave.

  Just as I was thinking that, Aunt Sissy came out onto the porch, dressed in sweats cut off at the knees and an oversized Minnesota Gophers shirt. “You can’t leave just yet,” she said.

  I laughed. “How did you know I was thinking that?”

  “I would be if I were you,” she said. “But you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I haven’t gotten to show you a good time,” she said.

  “Oh, Aunt Sissy,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Just one more day,” she said. “Today we’ll go into town and partake of the May festival. Then you can leave tomorrow.”

  I smiled. How could I refuse her? If she were indeed dying of heart disease, I might never get the chance to have fun with her again. When I thought of my childhood and the time spe
nt with my father’s family, Aunt Sissy was the bright shining light of those memories. One time we had gone crawdad fishing down at the local creek. She had worn her cut-off pants, as always, and a big fishing cap. Before that day, I could not catch a crawdad. After that day, not only was I the champion crawdad catcher, but I could even catch small catfish with my bare hands. To this day when I hear the rush of creek water over rocks, I think of her.

  “All right,” I said and smiled at her. “We’ll stay one more day.”

  Three hours later, Aunt Sissy, Colin, Rudy, and I were in downtown Olin preparing to watch the boat races. The sun was actually hot today, the familiar tightening of my skin indicating that I would be pink by sundown. Aunt Sissy introduced us to numerous people, all of whom were gracious enough not to ask about Colin the Convict or the woman with the black eye. We were seated comfortably on the portable bleachers, waiting for the races to begin—well, as comfortably as one can sit on a piece of metal—when Colin got a whiff of something.

  “Are those funnel cakes I smell?” he asked.

  “You know they are,” I said. “Your nose is never wrong.”

  “Anybody besides me want one?”

  “Yeah, I’ll go with you,” Rudy said. He looked at me. “You want something?”

  “A bottle of water.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Oh, will you look at that,” Aunt Sissy said. She held her hand up to her eyebrow to shield herself from the sun. Brilliant flecks of sunlight rippled across the lake. But it wasn’t the lake she was looking at. She was looking at somebody in the audience.

  “What? Is it Roberta? Should I hide or get on my boxing gloves?”

  “No, it’s Kimberly Canton,” she said.

  “Where?”

  She pointed. “Right there in that navy dotted swiss dress and the big white hat.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “Oh what?”

  “I’ve seen her before,” I said.

  “You have?” Aunt Sissy asked. “Where?”

  “She was in the historical society office with Roberta when I went there the last time. Before she decked me,” I said.

  Aunt Sissy gave me a peculiar expression. I had no idea what she was thinking, but somehow I felt that we were both on the same plane of confusion. Before I had much more time to think about it, the horn sounded for the races. I leaned in to Aunt Sissy. “Who do I want to win?”

  “These guys here,” she said and pointed to the canoe-looking boat on the end. “Their parents belong to our church.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said. The rowers stretched and jogged in place and then all got in their boat and picked up their oars. The gun went off and away they went. Rudy and Colin showed up just in time and I pointed out to them who we were rooting for. It was amazing how excited you could get for people you didn’t even know. By the end of the race I was jumping up and down and high-fiving the people sitting behind us.

  “That was fun,” I said, rather out of breath.

  “Yes, it was,” Rudy agreed.

  A few minutes went by while we waited for the next race, filled with small talk and weather talk. Then a woman appeared at the end of the bleachers and sat next to Aunt Sissy. The two of them talked a moment together and then Aunt Sissy introduced her. “This is Dicey. She works at the historical society,”

  “Oh, nice to meet you,” I said.

  “It’s turning green now,” Dicey said to me.

  “Huh?”

  “Your eye. I heard about it. It’s in the green stage,” she said.

  “Well, I guess that’s a good thing,” I said.

  Dicey was about sixty, severely pear-shaped, more salt than pepper in her hair, but barely a wrinkle on her face. She smiled and waved a hand at me. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Roberta is weird. In fact, all of them are weird.”

  “All of who?”

  “Her whole family is just a little on the strange side,” she said. “Her dad eats fish every morning for breakfast. He’s done that for, like, fifty years.”

  “Well, isn’t that omega fatty whatever it’s called in fish? It’s supposed to be vital for a healthy heart, so maybe he’s onto something,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said. “He stinks and so does his house.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She and Aunt Sissy talked some more about local things, and then my ears perked up when I heard her say Kimberly Canton’s name. “I can’t believe she has the gall to show up at these races,” Dicey said.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because she’s a grade A b—”

  “Other than that,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “She’s just showing off. Over half of the lake is hers now,” she said. “It’s just an advertisement to all of us that she’s going to own the whole damn thing soon. And the town with it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “There’s only a few people holding out,” Dicey said. “And they are probably going to sell to her sooner or later. Hopefully they won’t.”

  “What about Brian Bloomquist?” I asked.

  “What about him?”

  “What happens to his lakefront land now?” I said.

  “That’s the sad part,” she said. “His widow will probably sell, which Brian never would, because she’s going to need the money. Brian left behind four kids. They’re going to need an awful lot of shoes and clothes and food for the next ten or so years. The marina may even go up on the auction block.”

  “Surely the authorities know this,” I said to my aunt. “Surely she is a suspect in Brian’s murder.”

  “Airtight alibi, last I heard,” Dicey said. “She would have been my first choice, too, but she was in the cities in a meeting with, like, ten people.”

  I worked my lower lip between my teeth. “What’s her deal? Is it personal or is it strictly buisness?”

  “Who knows? She’s a vulture.”

  “Hmph,” I said.

  “What?” Aunt Sissy asked.

  “I dunno. Sheriff Aberg said that she somehow felt entitled to the land. Like it was supposed to be hers,” I said.

  “So?” Dicey asked.

  “So,” Aunt Sissy said, “I think I know where you’re going with this. At one time, one person owned all of the lakefront property.”

  “Isabelle Lansdowne,” I said. “You think Kimberly Canton might be a descendant of Isabelle Lansdowne?”

  “Maybe,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Yeah, but … Kimberly would have to know she was a descendant of her, and she would have to know that Isabelle had once owned all the lakefront property. What are the chances of that?” I asked.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Dicey asked.

  Aunt Sissy ignored Dicey. She shrugged and then brightened. “Hey, we don’t know how the lakefront property ended up being divided,” she said. “Maybe there was a deal that Kimberly feels was dishonest.”

  “I need to look at those land records again,” I said. “But I’m not real thrilled about going over there when Roberta’s on duty.”

  “Oh, I’m covering her lunch in half an hour,” said Dicey. “Why don’t you all come over then?”

  “We’ll be there,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Good,” I said. “We’ve got time for another race first, though. Right?”

  Twenty-two

  Just call me Special Agent Torie. That’s what I felt like as I sat in Aunt Sissy’s big rattletrap truck waiting for Roberta to leave on lunch break. Our vehicle was well hidden behind a big fir tree across the street and on the corner of the historical society. Dicey was going to flip the blinds on the windows twice if Roberta decided to dine in. That was highly unlikely, she thought, because it was so beautiful and the May Festival was in full swing.

  So we sat and we waited. Anticipation swirled around in my gut and I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to really have to wait for a person to leave a building so you could go and snoop around. If it weren’t for the fact that D
icey had the foreknowledge that Roberta would be leaving for lunch, we could be here all day. Sort of took the excitement out of being a spy.

  “If she doesn’t leave pretty soon, I’m going to go over and throw her out,” Aunt Sissy said.

  “Maybe she’s not going to go out for lunch.”

  “Then why hasn’t Dicey signaled? She said she would signal, for crying out loud. If a person says they’re going to signal, then they should signal.”

  “Aunt Sissy,” I said and touched her lightly on the arm. Then I pointed to the historical society. Roberta had just stepped out of the front doors and taken off down the sidewalk, toward the lake. “Let’s go.”

  We crossed the street as stealthily as we could, watching to make sure Roberta didn’t turn around and see us or head back to the historical society. It would be my luck that she would have forgotten something. We made it to the door, knocked quietly, and entered.

  “I never thought I would have to sneak into a historical society,” I said. “What is this world coming to?”

  “God, I thought she’d never leave,” Dicey said. “She just kept talking and talking.”

  “How long is she going to be gone?” I asked.

  “Probably an hour.”

  “Great,” I said. I pretended to push up sleeves that I wasn’t wearing. “Hand me over the records.”

  Dicey pulled a bunch of books off of the bookshelf and stacked them in front of me. I sat down in the only chair at the only desk in the room.

  “Good Lord, don’t let Roberta see you in her chair,” Dicey said.

  “I’ll try not to. Is there a back door to this place?”

  “No.”

  “Then you watch the front door and tell me the minute you see her.”

  “Right,” Dicey said. She went to the window to keep watch. Aunt Sissy knelt beside me and tried to assist me in any way she could.

  “Okay, we’re looking for what happened to the land surrounding Olin Lake. I guess I need to see if Isabelle Lansdowne, or her husband, sold off parcels of land surrounding the lake.”