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She read on.
I have decided that we should return to my late husband’s mother’s home in Denver. Although our relationship has not always been a smooth one, she is very fond of the children, and I will be able to find suitable employment. I hope you will allow the children and me to visit you before our departure.
Yours with a deeply grateful heart,
Mrs. Olaf (Olga) Johannsen
“Olaf and Olga,” Holly said. “I wonder whatever happened to her.”
“Here’s your answer.” Janine held up a card showing a young girl, in coat and hat, carrying a brightly wrapped package up a snowy hill to a cottage, beneath a full moon and a starry sky. “Postmarked December 10, 1928. It’s a Christmas card.”
Dear Mrs. McCaskill,
I think of you often and with gratitude …
She skimmed ahead.
You will be pleased to hear that both children are thriving. My mother-in-law has moved to her daughter’s home a few blocks away, leaving the children and me in the house in which their father was raised. Thank goodness the school district permits widows to teach. Although my salary is sufficient, it does not extend to luxuries, but thanks to your gift, there will be joy around our hearth on Christmas morning.
“First we’ve heard of gifts, not loans, right?”
“For women with children? Or particularly touching stories.”
“Or particularly gracious thank you notes.”
Other letters detailed similar tragedies. Several loans allowed women to leave abusive or alcoholic husbands, as they presumed had been the case with Elizabeth Pennington. Others told stories of depression and isolation, of husbands and suicide. One 1932 letter thanked Caro for sending “young Tom” to replenish the wood pile.
“You said your grandfather was born in 1916?” Nic asked. “That makes him sixteen. Almost a man back then.”
“If she was sending Mrs. O’Dell and Grandpa Tom on her errands,” Holly mused, “then Con must have known. Besides that one contribution, was she using her own money, do you think?”
But that, they couldn’t answer.
The most heartbreaking note came from a woman who thanked them for helping her take care of her husband after he was kicked in the head by a horse, then finally died.
“It’s a microcosm of the problems women faced back then. Before Social Security and welfare and other programs from the New Deal took hold,” Nic said.
“Same kind of problems women face today,” Holly said. “Except for being kicked in the head by a horse.”
Sarah stepped out on the deck, away from the lights of the lodge. Full dark now, though a smattering of stars blinked into view as her eyes adjusted. She’d been the kid who loved hearing the family stories, who’d sat at the big dining table in the lodge long after her sister and brother and cousins had asked to be excused and some of the adults had begun to drift in and out, who’d sat listening to their grandparents tell tales, some tall, some true. Reminiscing about the colorful characters who’d visited the lodge over the years. Which lumber company client shot that one-eyed bull elk who winked down at them from above the fireplace. Which of Grandpa Tom’s war buddies sent the oversized Navaho rug that still lay on the living room floor, a thank-you for a long-overdue vacation with his wife. Which cousin commandeered the baseball autographed by Joe DiMaggio for a pickup game and sent it through the kitchen window. Where was that baseball, anyway? She hadn’t seen it in Grandpa Tom’s office.
The McCaskill kids had been taught to be proud of their family legacy, how they’d taken care of the woods and provided jobs through the Depression and always supported progress in the tiny town of Deer Park.
But she had never heard these stories.
Was it the late night, the wine, or being together with her old gang after the stresses and sorrows of the last few months? Or the romance of a historic lakefront lodge and the discovery of secret letters, that had her thinking the house was talking to her? The house, and Caro.
And the woman in the dream.
But what were they saying? What were they telling her to do?
Back inside, the other three huddled together on the couch, poring over Ellen Lacey’s scrapbook. Sarah perched on the back of the couch and leaned in. As in Caro’s album, the photos and clippings, brittle with age, were mounted on black paper and captioned in white ink. In roughly chronologic order, they started with a shot of the shoreline taken from Bitterroot Lake, aboard the steamer U. S. Grant.
“There’s the point.” Holly dragged her finger across the photo to the outcropping just east of their property line. “And here’s where they built the lodge. The trees came nearly down to the lake.”
In the next photo, stumps and piles of logs, some as much as five feet across, dotted the slope above the shore. Every log and post and stick in the place had been cut right here and milled with a portable head rig.
Another series of photos and a clipping from the Deer Park Dispatch showed blasting and rock removal, by horse-drawn wagons using a series of ropes and pulleys and winches, to create a narrow road.
