Hidden Places (13 page)

‘‘Do you still have that letter? Could I see it?’’ I already knew what Gabe’s handwriting looked like. I could easily compare the two.

‘‘I don’t know if I kept that letter or not. I could look for it, I suppose. Is it important?’’

‘‘Yes, it’s very important.’’ But I knew I was asking the impossible with Aunt Batty’s house in the mess it was in. ‘‘If Matthew had died over in France,’’ I asked her, ‘‘would Frank Wyatt have told you?’’

‘‘Never! Frank hasn’t spoken to me since the night he burned my father’s house down.’’

‘‘He burned your father’s house down?’’

‘‘Yes, he certainly did! He wanted to plant peach trees on that plot of land and my house was in his way. Oh, he tried to make everyone think it was an accident but I knew better. I’m telling you, Toots—as sure as apples grow on apple trees, Frank Wyatt started that fire. I’ve had to live in the little cottage ever since.’’

She was describing a history I knew nothing about, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to know. I had been afraid of my father-inlaw from the very first day I met him. Later I grew to hate him for allowing Sam to die. He had always insisted that Aunt Batty was crazy. Now I wondered who I should believe.

‘‘Come to think of it,’’ she said, ‘‘it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Frank Wyatt made my kitchen roof cave in, too.’’

‘‘But he died last November. How could he—’’

‘‘Oh, you don’t know him like I did, Toots! He might have sawed through the roof timbers and then waited for it to snow.’’

I heaved a tired sigh. I had more questions now than before I started looking for answers. How was I ever going to untangle this mess? I turned to the last page in the album and found the very last picture of Matthew. He looked to be about eighteen years old, standing beside his brother Sam. Behind them was the newly painted sign on the side of the barn:
Wyatt Orchards—Frank Wyatt & Sons, Proprietors
. I carefully removed the photo and handed it to Aunt Batty.

‘‘I need to find Matthew, Aunt Batty. Do you have any idea what might have happened to him?’’

Aunt Batty didn’t answer me. Her mind had drifted off to another place and another time. In the silence, I heard a freight train rumbling past the orchard. The whistle’s mournful sound reminded me, as it always did, of all my years of longing for a home. I had criss-crossed the country on trains, gazing at the lights that glowed from the windows of the houses I passed, dreaming of a family and a house like this one. I’d made my decision ten years ago to grab hold of Wyatt Orchards and make it my own, never knowing its hidden secrets and heartaches, unprepared for all I had bargained for.

But now I had three kids to think about—kids I would lay down and die for. I had to find a way to make a living for them, to keep the home that belonged to them. I had to prove that Matthew Wyatt was dead.

‘‘Please, Aunt Batty. If you know anything at all about Matthew, please tell me.’’

She frowned. ‘‘If you want to understand what happened to Matthew, you’d have to understand my sister, Lydia, first.’’

‘‘Tell me anything you think might help. I don’t want to lose this orchard. I want it for my kids. It’s their home—my home.’’

She glanced at me sharply, an angry look suddenly crossing her face. ‘‘Are you sure you want to keep this orchard for those young ones? The price is very high, you know.’’

‘‘I know. The man from the bank wants five hundred dollars, and if I don’t pay him in ninety days we’ll lose everything.’’

She turned away. ‘‘Oh, it costs much more than that. It has already cost the lives of the people I loved....’’

Lydia ’s Story

Deer Springs, 1894

‘‘We need to be angels for each other, to give each
other strength and consolation. Because only when we
fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of
sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it.’’

HENRI NOUWEN

CHAPTER SIX

M
y sister, Lydia, was the most beautiful girl in Deer Springs—and I was the homeliest. Lydia could spend hours gazing at herself in the mirror, but I always turned my head away whenever I passed one because I hated what I saw. My face was as round and as plain as a baking powder biscuit, with a nose like a Roman emperor’s stuck right in the middle of it. And my body—well, my body certainly should have matured by the time I’d celebrated my twentieth birthday, but I was still as plump and flat-chested as a schoolgirl. My mother nagged me constantly about the way I slouched, warning that I’d surely cripple my spine if I didn’t stand up straight. But the taunts of my schoolmates and the nickname ‘‘Betty Butterball’’ rang louder in my ears than any of my mother’s warnings. I was short and fat and that was that.

My shoulder-length hair wasn’t chestnut like Lydia’s, or auburn or mahogany or some other glamorous color like the heroines of all my favorite novels. It was plain old brown, like mouse fur. Its unruly waves frizzed around my face like a bush, refusing to stay neatly piled on my head. My eyes, under thick, heavy brows, weren’t dark and mysterious like Lydia’s eyes, which had the rich luster of bronze velvet. They weren’t even an interesting color like hazel or caramel or sandalwood. They were just plain old brown, the color of dirt. No wonder the only things I knew about love and romance had come from books. No wonder I’d never had a single boyfriend until Frank Wyatt courted me.

Lydia was the one who attracted boyfriends like bees to apple blossoms. Lydia was seventeen months younger than me, and from the time she turned fourteen, her voluptuous figure had more curves than a country lane. If she hadn’t been my best friend, I would have hated her for certain. But the two of us were as close as two sisters could be, forced to turn to each other for affection and consolation by our grim, practical-minded parents. They staunchly refused to pet and cuddle us for fear we would grow up pampered and spoiled.

‘‘Children need discipline and order in their lives,’’ my mother believed, ‘‘not a bunch of foolish molly-coddling.’’ Her typical answer to all our wounds and heartaches was ‘‘Quit your bellyaching.’’

My father had married my mother, a spinster school mistress, when she was thirty-five and he was forty-two. He’d lost his first wife and two sons to a cholera epidemic and had hoped to produce another son to inherit his land. Instead, he’d been sorely disappointed to find himself stuck with two daughters. And after Lydia’s difficult arrival as a breech baby, my mother promptly moved him out of her bedroom, making it very clear that he would father no more children by her.

With tenderness and sympathy so hard to come by in our household, Lydia and I learned to rely on each other. ‘‘I’ll be your guardian angel, Betsy,’’ she promised, ‘‘and you can be mine.’’ We made a solemn vow to watch out for one another when I was eight and a half and she was seven, and we formalized it with a ‘‘pinkie promise.’’ We never let each other down.

That’s why I turned to Lydia in utter misery after I’d completed the eighth grade of grammar school and my father informed me what the future course of my life would be. He had called me away from my novel and my rocking chair on the front porch one soft summer day and ordered me into our front parlor. It was a bleak, colorless room with worn rugs on the floor and dreary pictures on the bare plaster walls, a room that felt chilly even in the summertime. We lived in an era of ornate Victorian frills—fringed horsehair sofas in silk tapestry and damask, glassfronted curio cabinets stuffed with ornaments and gewgaws, flocked wallpaper, crocheted doilies and antimacassars—but our farmhouse was as plain and as cold as my cheerless parents. We didn’t own a Gramophone or a stereopticon or a magic lantern— not even a piano or a cottage organ. The sound of the mantel clock ticking out the passing of time accompanied our evenings as we sat on the plain, mismatched furniture that other people had discarded. That’s where Father ordered me to sit on that warm afternoon, and coming from him, his plans for my future had the tone of a death knell.

‘‘I have decided that you will continue your education next fall,’’ he announced. ‘‘You will be a schoolteacher, like your mother.’’

‘‘But I don’t want to be a teacher!’’ I cried. In my fertile but nai
ve imagination, I had daydreamed of moving to New York City to become a newspaper reporter like my idol, Nellie Bly. My horror at the thought of being trapped in a desolate one-room schoolhouse all day with two dozen mulish farm children made me outspoken for the first time in my life.

‘‘Please, Father, don’t make me be a schoolteacher. I want to be a newspaper reporter and write for the
New York World
like Nellie Bly.’’

‘‘Out of the question. That is not a suitable career for a young woman, nor is New York City a suitable place to live. You will be a teacher.’’

The discussion was over. It was useless to try to argue with him. I would’ve had better luck trying to fly. He was my father and I had to obey him. Fathers were gods in their own households, determining when their family rose and when we slept, who we saw and who we didn’t see, how we thought, how we behaved, how we felt. I could no more decide the course of my life or my future than the cows could decide when they would be milked. To defy my father was unthinkable. I poured out my sorrow and disappointment on Lydia’s shoulder later that night.

‘‘Don’t cry, Betsy. Going to teachers’ school is an honor,’’ she tried to assure me. ‘‘Didn’t you tell me that Nellie Bly once studied to be a teacher, too?’’

‘‘Well...yes, until her father died and she ran out of money.’’

‘‘See? You can still become a newspaper reporter, just like she did.’’

‘‘So it isn’t ho...hopeless?’’ I asked, hiccuping through my tears. I took the handkerchief Lydia offered me and honked my beak of a nose.

We were in our attic bedroom where we shared all our secrets and a double bed, along with an ancient three-drawer dresser and an unfinished closet with mice. We’d moved the bed to the middle of the wall, squeezed between the two dormer windows so we could gaze up at the sky and the stars at night, even though the single-glazed windows were so drafty in the wintertime that frost sometimes formed on the inside of the glass. We had long since learned to sit up carefully in the morning so we wouldn’t bump our heads on the slanting ceiling. As cold as it was in winter, the room was stifling in the summer with the sun beating down on the tin roof right above our heads all day. On that hot summer night, as we hugged each other in our cotton nightgowns, our sweaty arms stuck together as if we’d been glued to each other with white paste.

‘‘It’s not hopeless at all!’’ Lydia said. ‘‘Father knows you’ve inherited all the brains in this family so he’s making sure you get a good education. Look at me—I’m so dim-witted I’ll probably never even make it to the eighth grade. All I’ll ever be good for is a wife and a mother. At least being a teacher is glamorous.’’

‘‘Ha! Then why are the women teachers always old spinsters?’’

‘‘You won’t be a spinster, Betsy,’’ she said smoothing back my unruly hair. ‘‘You’ll find a very special man who—’’

‘‘I don’t want a man! I want to be a newspaper reporter and be daring and brave like Nellie Bly. I want to expose injustice and corruption and change the world like she does.’’

Nellie Bly was twenty-three and I was fourteen when she pretended to be insane in order to write about life in a notorious women’s asylum. Her daring won her a job with
The New York World
and launched her adventurous career as a stunt reporter. I loved reading about all her exploits—posing as an unwed mother to expose the baby-buying trade, pretending to be a thief in order to see inside a New York City jail, and so on. In an age when most women were mere adornments on their husbands’ arms, Nellie was an independent woman who dared to enter a man’s world and prove she was just as good as they were—maybe even better.

But my dream of becoming a stunt reporter would have to wait. I attended school that fall and studied to be a teacher, as my father had decreed. During my second year there, Nellie Bly had the greatest adventure of her life: She traveled around the world, all alone, in an attempt to beat the hero’s record in Jules Verne’s novel,
Around the World in Eighty Days
. For two-and-a-half months the whole world followed her progress religiously as she made her way over land and sea, returning to New York in only seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes, and fourteen seconds. She was the most famous woman in the world and I wanted to be just like her.