Bitter Harvest Read Free Page B

the mix, a second bathroom. Again, none of those was going to happen until she had figured out her financial situation. And she had to factor in the dying furnace, which was pretty close to the top of the list. More money. Funny—up until last year, when she’d lost her banking job, she had always had more than enough money. She hadn’t been rich, but her salary had exceeded her needs and even her wants, and she’d been content. Now she had to look at every penny she spent. She wasn’t used to it, and she wasn’t happy about it.
    At least working online doing genealogy, her latest interest, was free. When her mother had visited recently she had begun to piece together the family tree, with some surprising results. In the thick of the harvest Meg hadn’t had time to digest what her mother had found; maybe this was a good opportunity to do that. And she could make a list of questions to ask Gail Selden at the Historical Society in town. Of course, she’d have to smooth the way with Gail by showing her some progress in the Historical Society records that she had agreed to catalogue—very slowly. The material was often fascinating, especially when she stumbled upon a document that shed light on farm life in the nineteenth century, and even her own house—the Warren house. She had a skeletal outline of her Warren ancestors, thanks to her mother, and maybe this was the opportunity to flesh them out a bit, so to speak.
    But she’d blanketed her workspace, otherwise known as the dining room table, with business records, and she didn’t want to disturb them. So, where to go? It would have to be another room altogether. The kitchen was too busy, and she needed the table space to eat there. The two rooms across the central hall were freezing: she wasn’t using them and kept their doors shut most of the time to conserve heat. But the front parlor was the only place she and Bree had to sit or do anything, so she would have to brave the cold and set up across the hall. With a sense of purpose Meg crossed the hall and pushed open the door.
    The front room was absolutely freezing, its windows partially frosted over, and she hurried to open the heating vents. There was little furniture, but Meg had found a folding card table and a couple of matching chairs, and they would do. She needed a light, and a plug for her laptop and printer, and she’d be set. And maybe if she left the doors open to the rest of the house, the temperature in the room would rise above what she estimated was about fifty degrees. Could she keyboard wearing gloves?
    At least moving furniture around and setting up her new workspace kept her warm for a while. She had placed the table so she had a view out the window (although not too near it, because she could feel cold eddies of air sneaking in around the sash), from which she could see the barest edge of the orchard up the hill. Funny—for the first few weeks she’d lived in the house, she hadn’t even known she had an orchard. How much things had changed!
    Meg booted up her laptop and pulled out a folder of notes her mother had left for her. It seemed like a lifetime ago now, even though it had been only a month, but the harvest had taken all her energy and attention. She used to think that genealogy was for retired grandmothers with too much time on their hands, but that was before she’d found herself living in a house that her ancestors had built—by hand—over two hundred years earlier; ancestors who had farmed the land, raised families in the house. Who had, in some obscure way, made her who she was today—or who at the very least had contributed a fragment of DNA, without which she would have been someone else. So she felt she owed them something. Besides, once she had gotten into it, she had discovered that the process was kind of fun. She opened the folder and started reading.
    Four hours later Meg sat back and realized she had forgotten to eat lunch. Her pile of papers had increased twofold,