In Sheep's Clothing Read Free Page B

personally, would be mean as hell to him.”
    â€œOh my God,” Colin said to me, all wide-eyed. “There are two of you.”
    Aunt Sissy and I burst into laughter, and Colin couldn’t hold it any longer and joined us. After he had regained control of himself, he rubbed his face with his hands and sighed. “I’m going fishing.”
    â€œHave fun,” I said. “Don’t drown.”
    â€œI’ll try not to,” he said as he left the kitchen.
    â€œDon’t get eaten by a crocodile or anything.”
    â€œNot a chance,” I heard him say from the stairwell.
    Aunt Sissy had finally sat down and begun eating her own breakfast. The farm wife always eats last, and it just doesn’t seem fair, since she’s the one who does all the work. Her kitchen was beautiful. Deep mahogany cabinets hung on two walls and blond wood made up the floor. It looked like pine of some sort. In Missouri, I worked for the historical society giving tours of the Gaheimer House, which is one of the oldest buildings in New Kassel. So I always notice things like beams in the ceilings, wood floors, and mouldings.
    â€œI forgot how beautiful this house is,” I said. I had visited her a handful of times since she moved up here twelve years ago.
    â€œYes,” she said. “I love it. Sometimes I think it was built just for me, and the land surrounding it was created just for me.”
    â€œI’ve lived in New Kassel all my life,” I said. “And I sort of feel the same way about it. Like, there’s just no place else on earth that I would ever feel comfortable with. But I wonder sometimes if that’s just because I’ve never known any other place.”
    â€œAll I know,” Aunt Sissy said, “is when we pulled into the driveway here, I really felt like I had come home.”
    â€œThat’s great,” I said. Aunt Sissy had been born and raised in southeast Missouri, and lived thirty of her married years in that same area. The fact that she could move in her late fifties and find a place that she liked even better was comforting somehow. As if there’s magic in the smallest corners of the universe.
    â€œOf course, the house had been completely renovated,” she said.
    â€œReally?”
    â€œThe house that was originally built here is long gone. Well, not completely,” she said. “The back porch and the cellar underneath it are still from the original homestead.”
    â€œHow long ago was that?”
    â€œEighteen fifty-eight,” she said.
    â€œOh,” I said. “I saw those numbers carved in the front concrete.”
    She gave me a peculiar look and then smiled. “Yes, the steps are the original steps, too. The house burned down and all that survived was the back porch, the cellar, the front steps, and the chimney.”
    â€œWow,” I said. “When did it burn?”
    â€œNot sure,” she said. “But I know that the land and the ruins just sort of stood neglected for a while and then another house was built here in 1878, I think.”
    â€œIs that this house?”
    â€œFor the most part. They just built around the chimney and the back porch and incorporated it into the new house. Isn’t that odd?”
    â€œYeah, sort of. Maybe the person who built it just couldn’t tear down what was left,” I said.
    â€œWell, anyway,” she said, clearing her dishes. “There was a fire in that house, too, and it destroyed the far western part of the house. So they rebuilt it. If you walk down the hall toward the bedrooms, you can see where they added the new part after the fire. Because the floors are uneven.”
    â€œOh, that’s cool,” I said. “I love things like that. It gives the house personality.”
    â€œAnyway, a family of thirteen lived here all during the Depression and the war years. Then it stood abandoned all through the sixties and seventies, and finally