CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

guess Root pretty much thought he’d died and gone to heaven when me and all my sisters came traipsing out of the Apple Tree Man’s tree. He jumped up and barked and ran around in circles, not knowing who to greet first. But he finally settled on me, stood up, and put his paws on my stomach, looking at me like I was the best thing he could ever find in this world, which, I suppose, from his point of view I was, seeing’s how I’m the one that first found him and does most of the looking after for him. But he was a dog full of love, and after I’d fussed some with him, he went and visited everybody else, full of wet kisses, that tail of his wagging so hard you’d think it was going to come off.

“Well, some things don’t change,” Adie said as she took Root’s paws in her hands and pushed him away from her. “I swear that dog’s got double his quota of loving enthusiasm.”

“He just missed us,” Ruth said, bending down and not minding Root’s sloppy kisses all over her face.

Adie pulled her to her feet.

“Don’t let him do that,” she said. “He’s putting germs all over your face.”

“Is that true?” Ruth asked Elsie, the Dillard expert in all things natural.

Elsie shrugged. “Probably.”

“Just think where that tongue of his has been,” Adie said.

“Yeah,” Laurel put in. “You forget what he uses to lick his butt?”

Seemed we were already settling right back into our usual sisterly ways.

“Anybody know what time it is?” Adie asked.

None of us had a watch, but I checked the position of the sun.

“Four,” I said. “Maybe four thirty.”

“We should get a move on,” Adie said. “Mama’s going to kill us, and don’t think for a minute she’s going to buy the story of what really happened to us today.”

“Hang on,” I said. “I just need to get Henny back into the barn and feed the chickens.”

“We’ll help,” Grace and Ruth chorused in the same breath.

“And let’s have one more look in that chest of Aunt Lillian’s,” Elsie said.

Adie started to shake her head, but as soon as Elsie brought it up, we were all interested.

“What’s another half hour,” Bess asked, “when we’re already as late as we are?”

“Yeah,” Laurel said to Adie. “You’ve already had a peek at all those pictures of hers.”

I don’t suppose Adie had much choice in the matter, not with all of us determined. Laurel and Elsie rounded up Henny and put her back into the barn, milking her and making sure that she had water and feed, while the younger twins and I saw to the chickens. We threw down extra feed for them, in case I was late getting back up tomorrow. Then we all trooped into the house and up the stairs to the second floor.

I guess with Aunt Lillian having been this famous artist, I should have expected her work to be good, but I was still right surprised when I got an actual look at all those fine drawings and paintings that filled the chest.

“They’re not paintings,” Elsie explained, when Laurel wondered aloud why the wooden panels Aunt Lillian had used weren’t hanging in some museum. “They’re what you call studies, something you do in preparation for the real painting.”

Ruth picked one up and held it closer to her face. “They look like real paintings to me.”

“Sure do,” Grace said. “They look good enough to hang in a museum to me.” She turned to her twin. “Remember that school trip we took to the museum in Tyson? These pictures are better than half the stuff we saw in there.”

Ruth nodded. “Yeah, at least these are about something.”

“Any museum would pay top dollar to own these,” Elsie said.

Laurel grinned. “I guess that means you’re rich, Janey.”

“Only if she sells them,” Elsie reminded us. “She might not want to do that.”

“I’ve got to think on it,” I said.

Truth was, I was feeling a little overwhelmed. It was strange enough, knowing I’d be holding paper on the homestead and all the hills around us, without taking into account all these paintings and sketchbooks. What I really wanted was to have Aunt Lillian back and for things to be the way they’d been before. I already missed her something terrible.

“You could probably afford to put in electricity and a phone line,” Adie said.

Laurel laughed. “Why’s she got to do that? She can just buy herself a big old house in town—have cable and everything.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

Adie shook her head. “So what is? To live hard and never have the time to enjoy life a little?”

“I don’t know that it’s something I can explain,” I said. “I felt the same way as you do when I first came up here and saw how Aunt Lillian was living. But the more I helped out and the more I learned, the more I came to understand that easy’s not necessarily better. When you do pretty much everything for yourself, you appreciate the things you’ve got a lot more than if someone just up and hands it to you, or you buy it off the shelf in some store.”

Adie looked at me for a long moment and I knew she still didn’t get it. But she wasn’t going to argue with me, neither.

“We should go,” she said. “Mama’s going to be back by now and worried sick.”

I nodded in agreement and was ready to leave, but just then Elsie pulled some more paintings from the bottom of the chest.

“Here they are,” she said.

“Are these paintings or—what did you call them—studies?” Ruth wanted to know.

“They were done as studies, the same as those of Aunt Lillian, but I guess they’re paintings, too.”

There were three of them and even I could tell right off that they’d been done by somebody else.

The first was of the staircase waterfall, where the creek took a sudden tumble before heading on again at a quieter pace. The second was of that old deserted homestead up a side valley of the hollow, its tin roof sagging, rotting walls falling inward. The last one could have been painted anywhere in this forest, but it was easy to imagine it had been done down by the creek, looking up the slope into a view of yellow birches, beech, and sprucy-pines growing thick and dense, with a shaft of light coming through a break in the canopy.

I don’t know much about art, but I liked these paintings a lot. They were kind of rough—without much detail—but I could recognize where they’d been done, and they were about as good as a picture gets. Not better than Aunt Lillian’s, just different. But Elsie got more excited than I’d seen her in a long time.

“These are the ones by Milo Johnson,” she said.

“The other famous artist,” Adie said. “One of the two fellows who disappeared in these woods back in the twenties or something that you were telling me about.”

Elsie nodded. “And now we know where they ended up.”

None of us said much for a time. We just sat there by the chest, thinking about the day we’d had.

“Any of you got a bad urge to go back across?” I asked.

Adie and the older twins shook their heads. The younger twins looked primed and ready, but I think that had more to do with the fun they’d had with Li’l Pater. Only Elsie got this kind of dreamy look that put a deep worry in me.

“Say you won’t try to go back,” I said to her.

She blinked, then looked at me. “I don’t know. Everything was so much more there than it is here. I hated all the business with those fairy courts, but I’ve got to admit that if the chance came up, I’d probably go.”

“Promise me you won’t unless you talk to me first.”

She met my gaze, then gave a slow nod.

“Okay, I promise,” she said.

“We have got to go home,” Adie said.

We put everything back into the chest, except for one of the sketchbooks filled with drawings and little handwritten descriptions of various plants and such. I wanted to bring it home with me, so I put it in the backpack that Adie’d used to carry preserves for Aunt Lillian. Then I closed the door to her house—no, it’s my house now, I realized—and we headed for home, stopping only to collect Laurel’s and Bess’s instrument cases along the way.

Grace and Ruth played innocent, but it didn’t take us long to figure out who’d played that trick of filling those cases with stones. I guess the only thing that saved them from getting a licking from the older twins was how close we’d all come to dying. Thing like that puts everything into a different perspective, that’s for sure.