The Revealing (13 page)

She had just sent Mim off to town with the letter when she heard Paisley call out to her. “Oh Rose. I’ve had a little accident. Can you come here? Quickly?”

Rose hurried upstairs to Bethany’s room. There in the middle of the quilt Bethany had just finished—the first quilt she had ever made—was a tipped-over bottle of bubble-gum-pink nail polish. The polish had started with a puddle and was now spreading out. Paisley stood in the center of the
room, a blank look on her face. “I was polishing my toes and must have knocked the bottle over.”

Rose quickly picked up the bottle and lifted the quilt as carefully as she could, so the rivers of polish would remain on that one quilt block and not spread onto others.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Paisley said, fanning her eyes with her hand as if she was trying not to cry. “It’s my condition, you see. I have become so clumsy.”

Rose’s first inclination was to ask her why she would paint her toenails on someone’s handmade quilt, but instead she said, “It’ll be all right. Bethany can replace that quilt block and it will be good as new.” She was trying to be polite to the girl. It would be a painstaking task to fix this quilt.

“Well,” Paisley snuffled like a little child. “If you’re sure.”

As Rose carried the quilt downstairs to the basement to try to get the stain out, she cringed, thinking of Bethany’s reaction. She was going to hit the roof when she saw her spoiled quilt. She had just finished it! Her first quilt.

After Paisley had recovered from her episode of near tears, she found Rose hanging the quilt on the clothesline and said she wanted a tour of the whole farm. Rose showed her the garden, the henhouse, the pastures, Silver Queen and her colt, and the barn. As they walked, Paisley was full of questions like how fast do chickens lay eggs—daily—and how long did it take for a horse to have a colt—about eleven months—and were sheep a good investment—no—and how much money did Rose think the whole place was worth? She asked Paisley what made her so curious about Eagle Hill and she said, “Oh, well. Tobe can’t stop raving about the place.” She peered into Flash’s stall and the old horse peered back at her. “I suppose it’s become like home to me.”

Rose was just about to ask Paisley where
her
home was, when Sammy came out of the feed room, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with hay. Paisley made a big fuss over him. “You’re such a little boy to be pushing that big wheelbarrow!”

Rose cringed. She knew how sensitive Sammy was about his small stature. His cheeks turned red and he got flustered and called her Parsley. She laughed the first time, then she got irritated when he called her Parsley a second time.

“Sammy,” Rose said, “I hear Silver Queen neighing for her dinner. Why don’t you head out to her.”

Sammy grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow and hurried out the barn door.

As soon as he was gone, Rose turned to Paisley. “Please don’t embarrass him. He’ll learn your name. It’s just a little . . . unusual.”

Paisley lifted her eyebrows at Rose and then nodded as if she understood a great secret. “Oh! Tobe didn’t tell me that Sammy was developmentally delayed.”

“What?” Rose said. “No! Not in the least.”

Luke came out of the feed room holding two buckets of oats. He walked through the aisle and out the barn door without a word, his face tight. A moment later, Rose heard a bloodcurdling scream come from the front yard.

“Luke Schrock! What have you done?!”

Oh dear. Bethany must have returned from the Sisters’ House and seen the quilt hanging on the clothesline. Rose had tried everything she could think of to remove the nail polish from the quilt, but the stain was permanent. She flew outside and dashed to the clothesline. Tending to the horses in the pastures, the boys dropped the feed and came running
toward the clothesline with all their might. Bethany stood by the quilt, examining the stain.

“It wasn’t Luke, Bethany,” Rose said, trying to stave off an explosion of words aimed at Luke. “It was Tobe’s friend, Paisley.”

Bethany looked like she was trying not to cry. “What? Who?”

“Her!” Luke pointed to Paisley, walking toward them from the barn, as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “And she’s staying in your room.” He was scowling at Paisley as she approached them.

“That would be me,” Paisley said, with an apologetic smile on her face. “I spilled my nail polish while I was doing my toes.” She stuck a hand out to Bethany, who was staring at her with a baffled look on her face. “Let’s see. You must be Bethany. I’m Paisley. Tobe’s Paisley. He’s told me all about you.”

Off in the distance, Rose noticed something awry. “The goat!” It had gotten into Silver Queen’s pasture and pulled hay off the wheelbarrow. The buckets, now empty of oats, lay on their sides, abandoned by Sammy. Silver Queen and her colt were helping themselves to the hay. Rose shooed Luke and Sammy off to finish feeding the rest of the stock.

Rose rubbed her temples. Could this day get any worse?

8

B
rooke liked Jon Hoeffner. She liked him quite a bit. He was possibly the most charming and easy-to-talk-to man she had ever met. He must be spoken for; a man like him wouldn’t be unattached. Could he?

She was taken aback when Jon waved to her at the Sweet Tooth Bakery the very next day when she dropped by.

“Good. I was hoping you’d be here,” he said, and her heart skipped a beat.

He seemed to be especially fascinated with her work and asked numerous questions, which was so different from other men who only talked about themselves. “But how,” he asked, leaning toward her, resting his forearms on the table, “does restoration differentiate itself from forgery?”

“It’s entirely different,” Brooke said, trying not to sound a little touchy on the subject. She was still sensitive about the museum curator’s accusation that she had been treading in dangerous waters. “Paintings are like fingerprints—they’re very unique, and for most forgers, there’s simply too much for them to duplicate. People get fooled when they’re only familiar with an artist’s name and not much else. You need to
know what an artist’s brushstrokes look like, what his or her favorite subject matters and compositions are, what kinds of mediums, materials, sizes, and formats they usually work in.”

Jon didn’t seem at all bored, quite the opposite. How refreshing! “I think it’s also important to know what the art looks like from the back, how it’s usually framed, mounted, or displayed, how and where it’s titled or numbered, what gallery it’s been in, what labels it’s likely to have.”

She paused again, aware she was doing all the talking, giving him an option to change the subject if he wanted. But his eyes were glued on hers and he nodded to encourage her to continue. “Then, of course, there’s signatures. A lot of forgers make the mistake of not studying an artist’s signature. You’d be amazed how many forgers miss something as small as setting the signature where an artist typically locates it.”

“Signatures?” Jon said, eyebrows lifting in surprise. “You can duplicate an artist’s signature?”

She smiled. “That’s one of the easiest things in the world for me to do.”

“And you’ve never gotten caught?”

She bristled. She could practically feel the hair rise on the back of her neck. “I’m a legitimate art restorer. Besides,” she tore off a bite of her cinnamon roll, “it’s hard to fool someone who knows how to analyze art.”

“Show me. Can you copy my signature?” He wrote it out on a piece of paper and slid it toward her.

She picked up the paper and studied his signature, noticing the way he curled his
H
, closed the circles on his
O
. He handed his pen to her and she wrote out his signature, then handed it to him.

“Amazing! It’s . . . nearly identical.”

She grinned at his response. “It’s easy when you know what you’re looking for.”

“Yes.” He smiled back at her. “I can see how that would be true.”

Vera marched into the kitchen where Rose was preparing dinner. “Those boys need to keep quiet. For Paisley’s sake. She’s trying to rest in the living room before supper.”

“I just sent them outside to play. They’re tossing a ball back and forth.”

“They’re too loud. They’re always loud. They can’t do anything quietly.”

Rose was cutting an onion to make chicken soup. With a match, she lit the blue ring of fire on the stove top and placed a big soup pot on the burner. She started to sweat the onion with a little olive oil, then added chopped carrots and celery. “Well, they are boys, Vera. They aren’t doing anything wrong.”

“It’s not good for her to be stressed. She says her nerves get easily frazzled.”

“Then why did she arrive at a stranger’s home toward the end of her pregnancy?” Rose added chicken broth to the pot, shredded chicken, noodles, minced parsley. “What could be more stressful than that? She should be with her own family.”

“She doesn’t have any family. She told me so.” Vera’s lips fit into a tight line. She crossed her arms against her chest. “You will try to treat her nice, won’t you?”

The soup began to simmer and Rose stirred it with a wooden spoon. “Oh, certainly,” she said, feeling more than a little bit aggravated at all the fuss. As Vera went outside to tell the boys
to stop playing so loudly, Rose turned her attention back to making dinner, with enough banging and clanging to shake the teeth loose in Paisley’s head and frazzle her nerves good.

Finally, Paisley came in from the living room. “Is there any way I can help get dinner ready?”

Rose looked up from stirring dough for biscuits, surprised and pleased. “Would you wash and dry these dishes?” She tilted her chin to motion toward a small mountain of dirty dishes in the sink.

Paisley craned her neck to look behind Rose, frowning. “There’s no dishwasher.”

“No. We hand wash all the dishes.” She set the bowl of biscuit dough to the side and reached for the hot water faucet. Water started to fill the sink as Rose squirted some dish soap into it. She swirled her hand in the water to suds up the soap. “All ready for you.”

Paisley took a few steps back. “Oh, bummer. I wish I could help, but I have very sensitive skin.”

“Sensitive skin?”

“Yes. Haven’t you ever noticed all the skin lotion commercials on TV? The actors are always redheads. Like me.” She pulled a ringlet out of her ponytail and twirled it around her finger. “Of course you wouldn’t! You don’t have a TV!” She held out her hands. “Anyway . . . my hands need special care or I break out in a terrible rash. I wish I could help. I really, truly do.” She smiled a weak attempt at an apology and went outside to sit on the porch swing in the sun.

By the time Bethany had moved a few things out of her room to make space for Paisley, she was calming down from
the quilt disaster. A tiny little bit.
Shootfire!
Who was this pregnant Paisley, anyhow? Bethany didn’t like her and didn’t know why the family was welcoming her with open arms.
Double shootfire!

She came downstairs to help Rose get supper ready, but the kitchen was empty. There was something good-smelling on the stove top and Bethany peeked inside, hoping Rose had made a broth-based soup and not that awful cream of mushroom that Mammi Vera was so fond of. Whatever it was, it would need to be stretched tonight. She had learned quite a bit about stretching soups from her weekly meal preparation for the down-and-outers at the Second Chance Café. Stretching a cream soup meant dumping in more cream. You ended up with a bowl of hot salty milk. Disgusting.