Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.

The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees … There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. There were only trees and the wild animals who had their homes among them. -Little House in the Big Woods

Two

“Want to stay over?” Roel­ke asked as they finished washing dinner dishes in his apartment.

“I can’t.” Chloe gave the last plate a swipe. “I didn’t get family information about the quilt from Miss Lila, and it’s bugging me. I’m going to drive down to Stoughton.”

“Can’t you just call?”

“I could, but I’m hoping Miss Lila has something in writing from her cousin that I can borrow and photocopy. I can say hey to my parents at the same time.”

“Want some company?”

Chloe kissed him. “I would love some company.”

Roel­ke drove, with Chloe’s palm resting on his thigh. The terrain was mostly rural and the evening was lovely. They made most of the hour-long trip in peaceful silence. Her mind was swirling with images of Laura and quilt squares as Roel­ke turned into her parents’ neighborhood.

He broke her reverie. “Chloe?” His voice held an unexpected note of tension. “Does Miss Lila live on the near side of your parents’ house, or the far side?”

She glanced at him. “Far side. Why?”

His jaw muscles tightened. She followed his gaze down the street … to the police cars. And the ambulance.

Chloe’s skin prickled. “Pull over. Pull over!” She was out of the truck before Roel­ke had cut the engine.

Her parents stood in their front yard with a police officer. Chloe ran to join them. “What’s going on?”

Dad shook his head. And Mom … Mom was crying. Mom never cried.

“What happened?” Chloe demanded. Roel­ke caught up and squeezed her shoulder. She shifted so she could feel him solid behind her.

“It’s Lila,” Mom managed. “When I went to check on her this evening, I found … ” Fresh tears welled.

“What did you find, Marit?” Roel­ke asked in his steady cop voice.

Mom swallowed visibly. “She was on the floor in her bedroom.”

“The window was open.” Dad looked stricken. “So was Miss Lila’s jewelry box—”

“What—about—Miss—Lila?” Chloe demanded.

“Oh Chloe.” Mom put a hand on Chloe’s arm. The affectionate gesture was so unusual that Chloe’s core temperature plunged another few degrees. “Lila is dead.”

Chloe heard a faint stirring in the atmosphere as her childhood, summoned when Miss Lila had walked into her office, receded again. “But … but I saw her just a few hours ago!” She looked at Roel­ke, as if he might somehow turn back the clock and fix this.

“I am so sorry,” he said. His eyes were dark and troubled, and they left no room for debate.

Two weeks later, when she saw her sister pull into the driveway, Chloe carried her suitcase outside. She studied the AMC Rambler. “You sure this beast is up to the trip?” she asked as Kari emerged.

“Trygve says so. But we can still switch to your car if you want.”

“No,” Chloe said quickly. Kari and her husband had purchased the sedan new fourteen years earlier because they wanted a Wisconsin-built car. It was one of the cheapest vehicles available and had over sixty thousand miles on it, but Tryg was meticulous about maintenance. The Rambler was surely more reliable than Chloe’s rust bucket Pinto.

Besides, if a massive oak tree happened to blow over and crash on the trunk, the quilt would be safer in the Rambler than in the back of her own hatchback.

With infinite care, Chloe nestled the gray archival box holding Laura’s quilt into the huge trunk. “I still can’t believe that Miss Lila is dead.”

“I know.”

Chloe tried to gulp down the lump in her throat. “Let’s go.” She slammed the trunk.

The sisters settled in for the four-hour drive to Pepin. It would be easier to deal with Miss Lila’s death, Chloe thought, if the cops had caught the SOB responsible. Miss Lila had died of a blow to the head. The cops believed she’d walked in on a robbery-in-progress.

Kari checked traffic before turning onto a county highway. “You’re doing the right thing. With the quilt, I mean.”

This is important, and I trust you. “I want to honor Miss Lila’s request,” Chloe said. And thank God I got that loan form signed, she added silently. She’d also sent photos and a description to a New York appraisal company that specialized in textiles, so if something did happen to the quilt, Old World Wisconsin had proof of value. Chloe tried to shake off visions of destruction. “My first goal is to see which site might make the best home for Miss Lila’s quilt.”

“There are other goals?”

“I hope to corroborate the family’s claim that Laura did once actually own the quilt.”

“You think that’s possible? To prove she owned it, I mean.”

“Who knows?” Chloe shrugged. “Maybe Laura mentioned the quilt in a letter. Maybe we can find a scrap of identical fabric in a quilt in one of the homesites’ collections.”

“I haven’t read the Little House books for years,” Kari confessed. “But I remember Laura and Mary sewing quilt blocks.”

“In By the Banks of Plum Creek Mary was sewing Nine Patch blocks, but Laura was making what she called a Bear’s Track quilt. It included bias seams, and she noted that her blocks were harder to construct than Mary’s.” Chloe smiled, vicariously celebrating Laura’s triumph. In the early Little House books, Mary usually excelled at whatever task presented itself.

“Did you find a name for the pattern in Miss Lila’s quilt?” Kari was a quilter, so her interest was genuine.

“I did some digging.” Chloe tried to sound offhand. “The oldest reference I can find calls the pattern Bear Paw, but later sources call it Bear Track.” Either name would fit the pattern of Miss Lila’s quilt. Each block was constructed of squares and triangles arranged to present four repeating motifs that did indeed suggest bear tracks or paws.

“Really? Oh my God, Chloe! Do you suppose there’s any chance that … ” Kari summoned the courage to finish her thought. “I can’t help hoping we’ll discover that Laura actually made the quilt Miss Lila owned.”

Instead of shouting, I know! Me too! Chloe forced herself to say, “That’s not likely.”

“Why not? It could be the quilt Laura wrote about making as a child.”

“Not necessarily. There are lots of different patterns with names like Bear Claw and Bear Track and Bear Boogie—”

“You made that one up.”

“Yes, but my point is valid. We have no way of knowing what pattern Laura used for her childhood quilt. Back then patterns weren’t named according to some kind of national standard or something. Women called blocks whatever they wished. I have nothing to indicate that Miss Lila’s quilt could actually be the Bear Track quilt Laura mentioned in Plum Creek.”

“But nothing to prove it isn’t, right? The fabric fits the time period?”

“It does,” Chloe allowed. “We’ll see what the lady we’re meeting with has to say.” The Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Society, which managed both the homesite and a museum in the town of Pepin, was an all-volunteer organization. Chloe had made an appointment to show Miss Lila’s quilt to the board member responsible for collections. And that person, she knew, would likely shoot gaping holes in the notion that Miss Lila might actually have come to own Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood quilt.

But Chloe couldn’t quite silence the voice in her head whispering, Maybe … just maybe …

Kari had never left her two daughters for more than a weekend before. After she stopped twice that morning to call home, Chloe started to wonder if this trip was a bad idea after all. They planned to be gone for ten days.

Then Chloe took the wheel. Kari pulled out a quilting project, and the handwork seemed to calm her anxiety. They left the interstate and stopped at the Norske Nook in Osseo, and Kari’s mood lifted even more as they valiantly attacked towering wedges of sour cream-raspberry and cream cheese-maple-raisin pie. The drive west toward the Mississippi River was gorgeous. By the time they hit Pepin, just a few miles from the Ingalls family’s homesite, the mood was much improved. Kari and I may not have much in common now, Chloe thought, but we’ll always have Laura and Mary.

“Almost there,” Kari said as they turned northwest.

Chloe flashed to their back seat days. “You sound just like Mom.”

“We’re about to walk the same ground Laura and Mary actually walked. What can I say? I’m eager to get there.”

Chloe smiled. Their visit to the museum in town was scheduled for later that day. She and Kari had planned their visit to the actual homesite to coincide with the first public program leading up to the Looking For Laura symposium. She was eager too.

“Why do you suppose Mom and Dad never brought us here?” Kari asked.

“Because Laura wasn’t Norwegian?”

“Oh, they aren’t that narrow.” After a moment Kari amended, “Well … maybe Mom is, sometimes.” She pointed ahead. “There it is!”

Chloe felt a puppy’s tail happy wiggle inside when she saw a sign for the Laura Ingalls Wilder Wayside. She pulled into the small lot and parked.

Then the inner happy wiggle subsided. “But … where are the woods?” she asked. The Wayside was a grassy picnic area, with a replica cabin representing the home were Laura was born. The few saplings sprinkled through the grounds were too young to provide shade. Picnic tables were scattered about, most occupied by other Laura sojourners wearing sunglasses and hats.

“Evidently the Big Woods have become the Big Cornfields.” Kari’s voice was hollow.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, as if hoping their dismay might miraculously transform farmland to old-growth forest. I should have anticipated this, Chloe thought. In the rush of preparing for the impromptu Laura tour, she’d gathered state maps and calculated mileage. She’d talked with her friend Dellyn about kitty-sitting, and her intern Nika about site-sitting, and her colleague Byron about training the next incoming batch of interpreters. Spare moments had been spent reacquainting herself with the talk she was to present at the Looking For Laura symposium. There had been no time to acknowledge that in all likelihood, the 1983 version of the Little House in the Big Woods cabin would not equate well with the charming Garth Williams illustrations lodged so firmly in her psyche.

Finally Kari sighed. “We’re way early for the program. We might as well have lunch and look around.”

As they climbed from the car, Chloe tried to adjust her attitude. “At least it’s not urban sprawl. This is still the place. And place has a lot of power to—”

“Help!” a woman shrieked. “Somebody, please—help him!”

Chloe and Kari exchanged an alarmed glance and ran toward a growing huddle of horrified picnickers. When Chloe slid between a couple of onlookers she saw a young man—maybe thirty?—curled on the ground. He wore blue jeans and a yellow t-shirt, and had a sleek swimmer’s physique, but the image of good health ended there. His arms were clenched tight over his belly. Horrible retching noises rasped the silence.

“I’ll run to the farmhouse across the road and call an ambulance,” Kari said, and took off.

Oh God, Chloe thought, as she dropped to her knees.

A pretty woman with Asian features crouched on the man’s other side, wringing her hands. “I don’t know what to do! Are you a doctor?”

“No.” Chloe felt desperately, horribly inadequate. “What happ-
ened?”

“I don’t know! I was sitting over there”—the other woman pointed to an empty lawn chair nearby—“and he was eating lunch. Then he just sort of fell over.”

Chloe put a hand on the man’s forehead. His skin was damp with sweat and blotched with hives. “Sir? Can you tell me what happened?”

He managed only a harsh, inarticulate wheeze in response. His brown eyes were wide open, imploring.

“Check his pockets for an epinephrine pen or kit,” Chloe ordered the other woman. “I think it’s anaphylaxis—some kind of allergic reaction.” She began searching his arms for a telltale wheal or tiny bee stinger left in the skin. “Does anybody have some ice?” she called. “And a pen knife? Even a credit card.” If she could find the damn stinger, she needed to scrape it off as fast as possible.

The man made a horrid choking sound. Then his muscles eased. He slipped from consciousness.

A heavy sensation settled in Chloe’s chest. Her basic first-aid training was no match for a closing airway. She didn’t see any signs of a bee sting on either arm. She switched to his ankles, shoving down crew socks, shoving up jeans as far as possible. No stinger.

“There’s nothing in his pockets!” the other woman moaned.

Just breathe, Chloe begged the man silently. She pressed one palm against his chest and felt a racing heartbeat. This was bad, bad, bad. If she was right about anaphylaxis, this guy needed a shot of epinephrine, fast.

Minutes ticked by like centuries. The Asian woman began to weep. Parents pulled their kids away. Then, at the same moment, two distinct sounds reached Chloe’s ears: The blessed wail of an approaching siren, and the terrifying underlying silence as the man stopped struggling for air.

Chloe rubbed her forehead. “I can’t believe it.”

She and Kari sat beside one of the token saplings in the picnic area. The EMTs had removed the young man’s body. They hadn’t said he was dead, but Chloe knew he was. A police officer had questioned Chloe, and the Asian woman too. Then the squad car had followed the ambulance. The other woman, clearly shaken, had spontaneously hugged Chloe before stowing her lawn chair in a blue VW and driving away.

Now Chloe felt numb and sad and jittery all at once. “He was so young. My age, maybe.” Chloe had recently turned thirty-three, and that was too young to die in a picnic grove.

She blew out a long breath. “Here’s what I don’t get: there’s no food here to purchase. Whatever he ate, he brought with him.”

“If he was allergic to something, surely he’d be very careful about it.”

Chloe watched a bee buzzing around a patch of clover. She heard again the choking sounds as the man tried to speak. Most of all she remembered the fear in his eyes. She had never felt so helpless. “I need pastry.”

“After pie? What I could use is a drink.” Kari’s eyes were troubled, and the faint smatter of freckles stood out against unusually pale skin.

Chloe had been so focused on her own shock that she hadn’t noticed Kari’s. “Hey, are you okay?”

“It’s just that … First Miss Lila, now this.”

“I don’t have booze or pastry, but we can at least eat some chocolate. Swiss, of course.” Chloe dug into her tote bag and produced a bar.

Kari tried to smile. “You’re a chocolate snob.”

“I am.” Living in Switzerland for several years while working at an open-air museum had spoiled her. Chloe broke the bar in half and nibbled slowly, willing inner calm.

A station wagon pulled into the Wayside lot, spilling parents and two little girls wearing Laura-wannabe calico sunbonnets. The girls raced toward the cabin. “Mom! It’s Laura’s house!”

“They remind me of you,” Kari said. “Somewhere I have a snapshot of you wearing a sunbonnet with your footie pajamas.”

Chloe shrugged without remorse. As a child, she hadn’t just wanted to emulate Laura; sometimes she was Laura. She’d worn a sunbonnet with her footie pajamas because—despite eating SpaghettiOs, doing homework, or taking a bath—she was still in the Big Woods.

“Just remember,” she said, “I have one of you and Trygve dressed like Ma and Pa Ingalls for Halloween.”

Kari had married her high school sweetheart the year they both graduated from the UW—her with a teaching degree, Trygve with a degree in Ag Science. They’d promptly settled into dairy farming and soon produced their beautiful girls, Anja and Astrid.

During those same years Chloe had gotten a graduate degree in museum studies, moved to Switzerland, and moved back to the US. She’d descended into clinical depression’s black well and made the painful crawl back to daylight. She’d almost gotten fired and lived on the edge of broke.

Chloe had seen her sister only infrequently since moving back to Wisconsin, usually at noisy family gatherings. She and Kari, who’d been close as little girls, had found little to talk about as adults. But in this clearing, Chloe finally felt the years and the distance peeling away.

Kari, who inexplicably didn’t consider even Swiss chocolate an adequate meal, claimed a table. Chloe fetched their picnic basket from the car. “You set up,” she said. “I’m going to take a peek at the cabin. It’s only going to get more crowded as we get closer to the program.”

“Sure.” Kari folded a napkin and placed it on the tablecloth.

Chloe slid her hands into her pockets and wandered toward the replica cabin. The two little girls were playing tag. That could have been me and Kari twenty-five years ago, Chloe thought. Their joyful laughter flowed into the raw places inside her.

She paused in front of the cabin, closed her eyes, breathed deep. Sometimes she could perceive strong emotions that lingered through time. She couldn’t predict it. She couldn’t manufacture it. The sensations came most often in old buildings, and a replica did not qualify. Still, this was the place—the place where Laura Elizabeth Wilder was born in 1867, and where she experienced the changing seasons with such visceral clarity that she was able to write about them decades later. Chloe tried to open herself to whatever Laura might have left behind in this place.

Nothing came.

She opened her eyes just in time to duck an errant Frisbee before it slammed into her temple. “Sorry!” a boy called, racing to reclaim the neon green disc.

This might be the place, but any Ingalls layer had evidently been plowed up, paved over, and lost long ago.

Chloe tried to swallow her disappointment. Well, she consoled herself, this is just the first stop. This trip would provide more opportunities to look for Laura.

A plump gray-haired woman emerged from the cabin. She wore blue polyester pants and a sweatshirt that said I Love Laura. She offered Chloe a tremulous smile that said, I think you understand why I’m here.

Chloe smiled back. Instead of grieving, she should be grateful to the volunteers who managed to preserve this ground and build a replica cabin, right here. The Big Woods may be gone, she thought, but we pilgrims have a place to visit anyway.

The Wayside was growing more crowded by the time Chloe and Kari finished their lunch. A work crew set up rows of folding chairs beneath an awning, and the parking lot filled.

“I’ll take the stuff back to the car,” Chloe offered. She stashed the picnic basket and grabbed another Swiss chocolate bar from the cooler. She liked having one on hand.

A mini school bus pulled off the highway and parked on the verge with a hydraulic wheeze. The bus door opened, and perhaps a dozen people stepped off and eagerly headed for the clearing—half to the cabin, the other half to the restrooms. All but two of the travelers were female, which wasn’t really surprising. What was surprising was the bus itself. Alta’s Laura Land Tours was emblazoned on the bus in big red letters. Here and there were icons dear to any Laura fan: cabin, butter churn, fiddle, rag doll, etc., etc. The artist had created a collage to rival the Partridge Family’s bus.

The woman who had organized the symposium and invited Chloe to speak was named Alta Allerbee. There can’t be too many Altas in attendance, Chloe thought, so—

“Because we are leaving now!” a man snarled nearby.

“But Wilbur,” a woman protested, “the program hasn’t started yet.”

Chloe recognized the lady who’d visited the cabin with such awed delight earlier. Shame on you, Wilbur, Chloe scolded silently. Quit being such a buzzkill.

Wilbur remained determined to kill any hint of buzz. “We’ve already been here for an hour.”

“I was talking to a volunteer inside—”

“You’ve seen the damn cabin,” he snapped. “You ate your damn lunch. For God’s sake, Hazel, get in the car!”

Chloe walked over to join them. “Hi!” she said with her biggest, brightest smile. “Would you like some chocolate? You’d be doing me a favor, really. It’s just going to melt.” She held out the bar, still sealed in its wrapper.

Wilbur’s expression suggested that she’d offered fried roaches. Behind bifocals, his eyes narrowed. His mouth was a tight twist. Close-clipped gray hair circled the top of his head, which was bald. Chloe hoped he’d applied sunscreen; a scalp burn would not help his disposition.

“It’s Swiss,” she added cheerfully.

Hazel accepted the bar, looking flustered. “That’s—why—you’re very kind.”

“So,” Chloe said conversationally, “are you folks just visiting Pepin, or are you doing a bigger tour?”

Hazel looked wide-eyed from Wilbur to this chocolate-bearing stranger.

“Get in the car, Hazel,” Wilbur said. He’d been smoking a cigar and hurled it to the ground inches from her feet.

Chloe frowned. What was this guy’s problem? “Maybe you should lighten up.”

“Maybe you should mind your own damn business!”

Walk away, Chloe told herself. While a stare-down with Wilbur might make her feel better, it would probably not help Hazel. She raised her hands in surrender. “Sorry. Just trying to be friendly.”

As Chloe turned, a lone woman wearing a long dress of purple calico and matching sunbonnet stepped from the Laura Land Tours bus. Maybe that was Alta Allerbee.

Chloe dug another chocolate bar from the cooler, ate a few bites to cleanse Wilbur’s vibes, and tucked it safely away again. Then she walked to the school bus. The bonneted lady stood beside it with her back to the Wayside. Her outfit could be classified as “old-timey,” rather than specific to the Little House in the Big Woods period, but Chloe didn’t care. Alta Allerbee was all about helping others find a beloved author, and therefore worthy of great respect and affection.

As Chloe approached, she realized that the woman was talking to someone else—someone hidden from view by the bus’s nose. Chloe paused a respectful distance away. She was watching a tiger swallowtail butterfly by the side of the road when the bonneted lady’s voice rose.

“Please don’t do that!” she begged. “You’ll ruin everything!”