Ruth
Again the next day, Nieman did not reply.
Monday morning. Fresh pot of coffee. Pens and notebook on one side, manila folders on the other, laptop on with multiple windows open: 1870 census, footnotes by Riley, map of Preble County.
It had been a long time since Ruth had taken out her file dedicated specifically to all the possible Wolf identities. She reviewed the sources of her previous confusion, the multiple names and identities that editor Laura Boyd hadn’t wanted to hear about, because to her, one bad man was the same as any other.
Not to Ruth.
Biographer Glenda Riley had said the Wolf was “generally believed to be a member of the Studabaker family.” But by whom, and according to what evidence?
Ruth’s own suspects, hardly unique among the conjecture found online, were as follows: an old man named Boose, sometimes spelled Bosse, or his son-in-law, a young Civil War veteran named Rannals, sometimes spelled Reynolds. Spellings were notoriously inconsistent in those days.
Ruth had plenty of secondary sources, all guesses made by others over the years, but as for primary sources, she had only one: an 1870 census document in which a ten-year-old named “Mosey, Ann” was listed as part of an extended “Boose” household. This same year, Annie was not listed as part of her biological mother’s household, miles away.
According to this document, farmer Abram Boose had a wife and a four-year-old child, but he also had a second orphan helping out—a thirteen-year-old boy named Solomon. When Annie talked or wrote about the Wolves, shouldn’t she have mentioned her fellow survivor? By all accounts, she never did. Reynolds had a wife and a baby, and most likely they lived in a separate cabin on the same farm. A couple with a baby would need help most of all. If the extended family split their orphan laborers, they might have sent the girl, Annie, to deal with the baby and kept older, stronger Solomon in the main house.
“James Rannals” was probably the Wolf. It was a fair guess, the one that felt almost but not completely right to Ruth.
There was one more outlandish option that Ruth couldn’t ignore because it had been mentioned by other respectable writers. Boose or Reynolds could have lent Annie out to their neighbor, as was frequently done. Close by, on a neighboring farm in Preble County, there were two families, most likely related, with the surname Wolf.
Ruth didn’t like the theory. It was pure conjecture; Annie was never named on any document associated with the extended Wolf family. And it was too neat, almost over the top. Because if the Wolf was named Wolf, then Annie hadn’t hidden her captor’s identity. The secret was no secret.
But a woman always kept secrets about these things, or so Ruth thought. Especially one as insistent upon control and propriety as Annie Oakley. It was one of the reasons abuse continued and nothing ever changed.
Ruth spent the afternoon hauling items up from the basement, tagging bags for donation pickup, stacking freebies at the curb and digging through drawers that might contain photos worth saving or documents in need of shredding, avoiding still the opening of other boxes and those two oddly heavy suitcases, one held shut by a flimsy lock.
Still, Ruth was not disheartened. As the piles grew, she felt a momentum building. She was astonished by the sheer amount being flushed out of previously ignored closets and corners. The human propensity to collect and lose track of what one has collected had often delighted Ruth as an aspiring historian. Just last year, in a barn, a family had discovered a crate of letters covered in mouse droppings from the famous suffragettes Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It had been moved several times and camouflaged for decades by the other clutter surrounding it: books, magazines, tools and old furniture.
See? Things are found all the time. You can never be sure.
But Gwen McClintock wasn’t Susan B. Anthony, nor was Kennidy McClintock Annie Oakley, Ruth mused, opening an old desk drawer to find only more canceled checks and a slew of pink “while you were out” phone messages, blackened with frantic doodles—who bothered keeping those?—that no one would ever want to read or store.
She had already closed the drawer and was turning to go, desperate to have a break from the dank basement. But then she turned back.
If those were messages to a historical figure, you would have made sure to read every one. Her finger slid under the bronze pull. She opened the drawer.
That message on the top, taken for Gwen by a receptionist at her phlebotomy job, was from “the school.” The message read: Expecting you at meeting tomorrow 9 am next Mon re: Kennidy, urgent. The next two messages were variations on the theme. The principal at Horizon High had been trying to reach Gwen several times that month of May. A fourth slip said: Missed you at meeting, urge you to reschedule.
Gwen avoided Horizon High. She would have used work as an excuse. Ruth’s best guess was that Gwen never attended those school meetings and possibly never returned the calls, either. But that hadn’t stopped her from doodling on the pink notes themselves, tracing over the phone number of the principal’s office. In one place, she’d traced and retraced the number 8 so intently that the pen had broken through the page.