Bitterroot Lake by Alicia Beckman (i read a book .TXT) 📕

thanks to your gift, there will be joy around our hearth on Christmas morning.

“First we’ve heard of gifts, not loans, right?”

“For women with children? Or particularly touching stories.”

“Or particularly gracious thank you notes.”

Other letters detailed similar tragedies. Several loans allowed women to leave abusive or alcoholic husbands, as they presumed had been the case with Elizabeth Pennington. Others told stories of depression and isolation, of husbands and suicide. One 1932 letter thanked Caro for sending “young Tom” to replenish the wood pile.

“You said your grandfather was born in 1916?” Nic asked. “That makes him sixteen. Almost a man back then.”

“If she was sending Mrs. O’Dell and Grandpa Tom on her errands,” Holly mused, “then Con must have known. Besides that one contribution, was she using her own money, do you think?”

But that, they couldn’t answer.

The most heartbreaking note came from a woman who thanked them for helping her take care of her husband after he was kicked in the head by a horse, then finally died.

“It’s a microcosm of the problems women faced back then. Before Social Security and welfare and other programs from the New Deal took hold,” Nic said.

“Same kind of problems women face today,” Holly said. “Except for being kicked in the head by a horse.”

Sarah stepped out on the deck, away from the lights of the lodge. Full dark now, though a smattering of stars blinked into view as her eyes adjusted. She’d been the kid who loved hearing the family stories, who’d sat at the big dining table in the lodge long after her sister and brother and cousins had asked to be excused and some of the adults had begun to drift in and out, who’d sat listening to their grandparents tell tales, some tall, some true. Reminiscing about the colorful characters who’d visited the lodge over the years. Which lumber company client shot that one-eyed bull elk who winked down at them from above the fireplace. Which of Grandpa Tom’s war buddies sent the oversized Navaho rug that still lay on the living room floor, a thank-you for a long-overdue vacation with his wife. Which cousin commandeered the baseball autographed by Joe DiMaggio for a pickup game and sent it through the kitchen window. Where was that baseball, anyway? She hadn’t seen it in Grandpa Tom’s office.

The McCaskill kids had been taught to be proud of their family legacy, how they’d taken care of the woods and provided jobs through the Depression and always supported progress in the tiny town of Deer Park.

But she had never heard these stories.

Was it the late night, the wine, or being together with her old gang after the stresses and sorrows of the last few months? Or the romance of a historic lakefront lodge and the discovery of secret letters, that had her thinking the house was talking to her? The house, and Caro.

And the woman in the dream.

But what were they saying? What were they telling her to do?

Back inside, the other three huddled together on the couch, poring over Ellen Lacey’s scrapbook. Sarah perched on the back of the couch and leaned in. As in Caro’s album, the photos and clippings, brittle with age, were mounted on black paper and captioned in white ink. In roughly chronologic order, they started with a shot of the shoreline taken from Bitterroot Lake, aboard the steamer U. S. Grant.

“There’s the point.” Holly dragged her finger across the photo to the outcropping just east of their property line. “And here’s where they built the lodge. The trees came nearly down to the lake.”

In the next photo, stumps and piles of logs, some as much as five feet across, dotted the slope above the shore. Every log and post and stick in the place had been cut right here and milled with a portable head rig.

Another series of photos and a clipping from the Deer Park Dispatch showed blasting and rock removal, by horse-drawn wagons using a series of ropes and pulleys and winches, to create a narrow road.

“The beginnings of the North Shore Road,” Nic said. “Not that it’s much of a road now, but construction must have been a bear.”

“It didn’t go all the way around the lake until the late ’30s,” Sarah said. “The WPA finished it. You wanted to get west of here, you had to take the steamer. In Caro’s journal, she says Con spent the week in town during the summer, while the family stayed at the lodge. Town’s minutes away now, but back then, getting there took hours.”

Ellen Lacey had listed men who’d worked on the project and their wages. She’d pasted in receipts, the paper yellowed. Sarah almost whistled at the cost of the staircase. And seriously? Was the lamp over the game table in the corner, the one some tall McCaskill lad or his friends were always bumping with his head when penny ante poker got antic, a genuine Tiffany?

Someone—Ellen, she presumed—had added sketches of a bird’s nest found near a felled tree. On other pages, she’d drawn spring grasses and wildflowers—yellow glacier lilies, red paintbrush, bluebells. And a bitterroot, the state flower, for which the lake had been named. Page by page, they watched the lodge take shape—the ridgepole, walls, and windows, until finally, what they saw in the scrapbook matched what they saw around them, give or take a hundred years.

“The Laceys,” she said at the photo of the couple standing on the front steps with their children, the boy beaming at the photographer while pointing a stick at the date 1920 carved in the stone foundation. It was still there.

What joy for Ellen to see her vision come to life, this stunning retreat on the edge of the lake. To descend the grand staircase, preside over picnics and parties, smile as her children tumbled down the lawn.

“I wonder what ever happened to them.” Several rolls of heavy paper lay on the table next to the journals and albums. “Are those the pictures from the trunk?”

Holly set her glass