No Nest for the Wicket by Donna Andrews

Author:Donna Andrews [Andrews, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781429992084
Published: 2011-05-23T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-three

It wasn’t quite that bad. We hit pay dirt in box nineteen. Not that we didn’t find a great many strange and interesting things in the first eighteen boxes. Hundreds of old photos, the kind where everyone begins to look alike because they’re all frowning from the effort of sitting still long enough. Hundreds of old letters that we didn’t read—half of them were cross-written, to save paper, and most were in fading ink on fragile paper. Newspapers we didn’t dare open for fear they’d crumble. We weren’t looking for contents yet, just dates. Anything from during or shortly after the Civil War we studied carefully and put aside in a special stack—a small stack. Most of the stuff was from the late 1800s through the 1920s.

“Hey, that’s still pretty old,” Michael said when I complained about this. “Probably a great research project here. I recognize most of the last names—old Caerphilly families. And all the newspapers and documents are local.”

“Fodder for a real history of Caerphilly,” I said. “Something a lot more accurate than Mrs. Pruitt’s version.”

“You thinking of writing it?” he asked.

“Not on your life. “That’s a job for a real historian. But I have changed my mind about giving them to someone from UVa or Caerphilly. Caerphilly didn’t care, and UVa sicced Lindsay on me, though I suppose that’s Helen Carmichael’s fault, not UVa’s.”

“Then what are you going to do with it all?” Michael asked, eyeing the stack of boxes.

“Give it to Joss, if she wants it,” I said. “If she’s serious about studying American history, well, here’s a motherlode of original source material she can cut her teeth on.”

“Keep it in the family,” Michael said, nodding. “Good plan.”

I’d hit a dull patch in box nineteen—a bunch of documents from the mid 1950s and early 1960s, which made them about a century too new to be useful at the moment. Still, I kept on methodically. After all, I’d made no effort to arrange things by date, only to gather all the papers of possible historical interest in the boxes.

At the bottom of the box I’d begun to call the “Eisenhower archive,” I found it—a nondescript manila file folder, but when I opened it, I discovered the original photograph of Col. Jedidiah Pruitt and his wife and daughter.

I opened my mouth, but before I could tell Michael, I became transfixed by the photo. Not so much by the contents—though it was easier, in the original, to get some idea of their personalities. The colonel looked smug and self-satisfied, less interested in his wife or the new addition to his family than in preening for the photographer. At first glance, his wife looked demure, with her lace bonnet and downcast eyes. Demure, and surprisingly young for someone who’d had fourteen children. Doubtless she’d started having them at an age when modern girls aren’t even allowed to baby-sit. After studying her for a few minutes, I decided her eyes weren’t downcast after all. She was glaring sideways at the

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