Five

The next morning before the break of dawn, the reveille startled Tiffin and me awake, causing us to tumble onto the floor in a giant heap of human, corgi, and blankets.

I scrambled into a sitting position, and the corgi yelped as I sat on his paw. “Sorry, buddy.” He scowled at me. I picked up Tiffin and placed him back on the top of my bed and tucked my blankets and sheets around him. He snuggled down into his little nest and then wasn’t the slightest bit concerned about all the commotion outside.

The reveille came again, and I massaged my temples. “War waits for no one,” I muttered.

I found a fresh Barton Farm polo shirt and a pair of relatively clean jeans and threw them on. When I stepped out of my bedroom, I found Dad downstairs in the living room giving himself an insulin shot in the belly. Dad was a type 1 diabetic. On the coffee table beside his blood sugar meter sat a mug of coffee and a copy of North and South. “Quite a ruckus you have going on out there.” He put the syringe away.

Hayden’s tabby cat, Benjamin Franklin, watched Dad’s movements with his one good eye. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frankie didn’t plot to steal one of my father’s syringes. The wily feline was notorious for stealing small pieces of property and burying them in his litter box. My watch was his latest victim. I could not bring myself to wear it again.

“That’s one way to describe it,” I said with a yawn. The clock in the kitchen read five thirty. I groaned. I had a long day ahead. Another hour of sleep would have been appreciated. The conversation I had with Maxwell the day before came rushing back to me, and I felt sick to my stomach.

“Coffee?” Dad asked.

My tummy rolled.

“How does your son sleep through that noise?” Dad asked.

“It’s a trait he inherited from his father. Eddie can sleep through a foghorn going off in his ear.”

Dad frowned. He was not a fan of my ex-husband.

The bugle went off again, and I was actually relieved to hear it. I didn’t want to get into another argument with Dad about my son’s father.

I grabbed my notebook from the coffee table and slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans. “I’m going to do a quick walk around.”

Tiffin ran to the door and shook his tailless rump at me.

I laughed. “You can come too.” I lifted his leash off of the peg by the door but didn’t attach it to his collar.

It was before dawn, and the sky was just beginning to lighten over the treetops to the east. A white-tailed deer leaped out of the woods and ran behind my cottage. I wondered if she was disturbed by the early-morning wakeup call too.

Despite the lack of light, I could hear the rustle of the soldiers and their families starting their day. I walked through the maple tree grove that hid my cottage from the view of the rest of the Farm.

Children played quietly in their night dresses, and women started campfires. Tiffin lifted his long nose in the air as the first whiff of bacon floated our way. Next to a gas lantern, Abraham Lincoln trimmed the edges of his beard with a straight razor in front of a round mirror tacked to a tree trunk.

A few feet away, our second famous reenactor, Walt Whitman, scratched lines into a leather-bound diary with the stub of a pencil. His long white beard dipped onto the paper as he wrote.

Tiffin ran ahead of me, looking back every few leaps to make sure I continued to follow him. He took the responsibility of herding, even if it was just herding me, seriously.

As much as I loved the reenactors being there to draw a crowd to my small living history museum, I was happy to cross the street and stroll around the sleepy deserted village. My interpreters wouldn’t report to work for another three hours. As the Bartons’ three-story brick residence came into view, I could imagine what it must have been like nearly two hundred years ago when a growing family of eight lived in the home. In my mind’s eye, I saw the boys in the family frightening their sisters with frogs and crickets hidden in their pockets. I imagined their mother admonishing them and their father trying to hide his smile behind his newspaper.

To me, those moments—the day-to-day lives of people who called the valley home—were what Barton Farm was really about. The battles and politicians were important, of course. They changed history and lives with their outcomes and laws. Those touched me as a historian, but they didn’t touch me as person in the same way the small details of daily nineteenth-century life did.

The small details and the children who should know about them were the reasons I had to do everything within my power to keep Barton Farm open, even if it required me to speak to Cynthia directly about the Farm, the foundation, and her illness. Cynthia was kind, but she was a proud woman and would not be happy that I knew of her failing health.

The first building on the village side of Maple Grove Lane was the barn. I waved to Jason as he guided one of the cows into the pasture with a rough rope. The interpreters called Jason “Barn Boy” since he was seldom seen outside of the barn. He was a quiet kid who studied animal husbandry at a technical college in a neighboring county. What he lacked in social skills, he made up for in his connection with the Farm’s animals. They all adored him. Even my pampered corgi Tiffin preferred Jason to me.

The shy teenager simply nodded to me in return.

Tiffin ran toward the barn to greet his friend, and Jason knelt down and hugged the dog.

I smiled and headed toward Barton House. Outside the house sat a spinning wheel that one of the interpreters had forgotten to put away the night before. Luckily, it had not rained or the wheel could have been damaged. I would have to remind the staff to lock all the artifacts inside their assigned buildings before they left each night. I made a note in my notebook before returning it to my pocket.

The sky was lighter now, and in the dim light, I could make out the tent covering the brick pit. To my surprise, I saw what looked like the pit’s tarp sitting in front of Benji’s worktable. That was unusual. Benji never left the pit uncovered at night. If she did, the mud would dry out, and it would take her half the morning to get it into brickmaking condition again.

I sighed and made another note. We were having an unseasonably hot June, and I was sure the exposed mud was dried solid. Benji would have to saturate the pit before the Farm opened and stomp it for a good twenty minutes if she had any hope of showing our guests how to make bricks today.

As I drew closer to the pit, I saw movement. I wondered if it was possible one of our barn cats had cornered a defenseless chipmunk or mouse in the mud. But I saw the form was much larger than a chipmunk or a cat …

A blond man squatted inside the pit.

“Excuse me, sir, what are you doing? You shouldn’t be over here. The village doesn’t open until ten.”

The man stood, and when he did I saw another person in the pit. That person wasn’t moving. Fear clenched inside of my chest, and I took a step back.

I focused on the second man’s feet. They were the size of bread loaves and bright red. The inflated toes were bordering on grotesque, and I had to look away.

The first man, the live one, stared at me. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

What does it look like? my brain asked. It looked like a dead body. My mouth felt dry.

“I saw him down here,” he said, “and I hopped in to see if I could help, but he was already gone.”

“What happened?” I asked, fully aware that my voice was two octaves higher than normal.

“Bee stings, I think. I got stung a few times myself.”

“Bees?” A shiver traveled up my spine. Against my better judgment, I stepped closer to the pit and peered at the man’s face. I saw my worst fear. “He was allergic.”

“You knew him?”

“Yes, I knew him. It’s Maxwell Cherry.” Shaking, I reached into my pocket for my phone and called 911.