“What a silly notion, child!” she could hear Great-Aunt Agatha announce firmly. “If they are good, the dead go to Heaven. If they are evil, they go to Hell. What they do not do, missy, is hang around the world from which they have departed, carrying on in death just as they did in life! It was undoubtedly Henrietta who put such a heathenish idea into your head. She ought to be ashamed of herself! But, then, I’m certain she is not, no—for she has never suffered any shame at all at her wild behavior, no matter how grievous it has proved to her poor family!”
“Henrietta” had been Gram’s given name. Hallie was named after her.
Covering her mouth, Hallie yawned widely, dully realizing she was so thoroughly exhausted that she was about to fall sound asleep sitting straight up in her chair.
“Well, Gram, as much as I’d like to continue this somewhat lopsided conversation, I’m afraid I really do need to get to bed. I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
In fact, Hallie was so tired that instead of washing the dishes, as she normally would have done, she set her cup and plate to one side of the sink. Then, after extinguishing all the oil lamps in the back parlor, she turned on her flashlight to guide her in the darkness and trudged back upstairs, not even bothering with her luggage.
She would unpack tomorrow, when she was rested and feeling more herself. Right now, she had the most peculiar sensation that by coming back here to Meadowsweet, she had somehow been mysteriously transported back in time to her childhood. She was thinking, saying and doing things she had not thought of in years—and talking to herself, besides.
What she needed was a long hot bath, followed by a nice soft bed.
But in the end, Hallie skipped the former and, stripping off her clothes, headed straight for the latter in her childhood bedroom.
Her last thought as she drifted into slumber was that somewhere outside in the night, a lone wolf was howling in the storm.
Chapter 4
Reading the Tea Leaves
When Hallie awoke the following morning, it was to the raucous noise of a rooster crowing and a bell chiming.
For a moment, still half asleep and disoriented by the sight of the room that met her drowsy gaze, she mistakenly believed she was a child again, and she waited expectantly to hear Gram’s footsteps in the main hall below and the muffled sound of voices as the door was answered.
Then, abruptly coming to her senses, Hallie remembered she was a woman fully grown and that her grandmother was dead. Jolted into action, she reached for the alarm clock on the night table, only to realize she had never set it the night before, so that was not what was ringing. It must be her cell phone. But, no, she had left that in her purse downstairs last evening.
It really was the front doorbell chiming, then, just as she had initially surmised.
Leaping from her childhood bed, Hallie hastily dragged on the same crumpled clothes she had so tiredly discarded the night before, then combed her fingers roughly through her long blond hair. She supposed that even so, she looked a fright, and she wondered who could possibly be here at this early hour.
Then, glancing at the alarm clock, she realized it was half past ten, that the morning was well advanced, that it was she who was late, rather than the hour that was early.
Not bothering with her shoes, Hallie scrambled down the stairs in the main hall, reaching the front door just as the bell rang again.
“Gram!” she cried, stunned, as she opened the door and spied the elderly lady standing on the wide wooden verandah.
“Oh, dear, I fear it never even occurred to me that you would mistake me for Henrietta, child,” the older woman announced, obviously flustered by the error, shaking her hatted head and clucking with disapproval at herself. “How very stupid and thoughtless of me! What a shock it must have been to you to see me, then. No wonder your poor, lovely face has gone so very white. I’m so sorry. You’ll have to forgive me for being such a foolish old woman!
“I’m Gwendolyn Lassiter, Henrietta’s younger sister—and I do apologize if it seems presumptuous of me, child, but after all these years, well, I’m old and so I probably don’t have much time left, and I thought it was high time we finally met!”
“Aunt…Aunt Gwen…yes…yes, I can see, now, that you’re not Gram—although you do look a lot like her! I should have realized, but I—I just awoke, you see,” Hallie confessed. “So I’m afraid I’m not at my best.”
“Oh, dear,” Aunt Gwen reiterated ruefully. “I didn’t think about the fact that you might still be in bed, either. But I expect you were worn out from your long journey. I can’t believe you drove all the way here from back East—and all by yourself, too! You must be a very brave and resourceful young woman. Is that your little car I saw under the carport? But it must be, of course. It’s darling. Well, aren’t you going to invite me in, dear? Or did Aggie and Edie succeed in convincing you I am as dreadful a black sheep as they always thought Hennie was?”
As she spoke, the elderly lady’s faded blue eyes twinkled with delight, and a mischievous dimple appeared in one cheek, so Hallie got a glimpse of what she must have been like as a child and could not repress an answering grin.
“I think maybe you were only a gray sheep, Aunt Gwen!”
At that, the older woman’s laughter tinkled brightly.
“Well, I can’t say I find that very gratifying,” she declared stoutly. “For I think I would quite like to have been painted just as black a sheep as poor Hennie was. So scandalous and exciting, you know—although I daresay that in this day and age, one’s elopement with the fiancé of one’s sister would scarcely raise even an eyebrow, much less start a decades-long family feud!”
“No, I don’t suppose it would,” Hallie agreed, holding open the screen door. “Please forgive my momentary lapse in good manners, and do come inside, and tell me how you came to be here.”
“As to that, Hallie, for the past several years, since my husband passed away, I lived here with Hennie—right up until the day she died, of course. But at her death, Meadowsweet became yours, so I didn’t feel it would be right of me to go on staying here at the farmhouse—especially when you might not even know I still existed. So I moved into Wolf Creek’s one and only bed-and-breakfast.”
“Oh, Aunt Gwen, you needn’t have done that,” Hallie insisted as she led her great-aunt into the kitchen. “I wish I’d known you were here, but Gram never said a word about it to me. I wonder why.”
“That was my fault. I fear I’m a bit of a coward, child, and I simply didn’t want Aggie and Edie to learn I was here. They would have believed I had sided with Hennie against them, and they would have written me off, just as they did her.
“Such a real pity, it was, that they decided to go on holding their grudge against her for the rest of their lives, when we all might have been friends. But there it is. I suppose that in the end, they had simply held on to their bitterness for so long that they just couldn’t let it go—not that there was ever any true justification for it, of course.
“It was always Hennie, not Aggie, poor young Jotham Taylor had come to the town house to court, and it was only Father’s wholly archaic notions about the eldest daughters being married before the younger ones that caused him to try to foist Aggie off onto Jotham. But, then, Father had been born during an earlier century and era, so he was very straitlaced and highly principled, and he refused to waver. Eventually, he succeeded in maneuvering poor Jotham into offering for Aggie instead, but naturally, once that deed was actually done, both Jotham and Hennie were miserable. So, finally, they decided to cut their losses and elope.”
“I never knew that—the whole story, I mean…only bits and pieces,” Hallie said, fascinated by this peek into her family’s past. “It really was too bad of Aunts Agatha and Edith to hold such a terrible grudge,