At Home on Ladybug Farm (31 page)

“I know,” Lori said softly. “But I’m not a child anymore.” She took a breath. “Even though I’ve been acting like one. All of that nonsense with sheep and chickens and jam and expensive B&Bs . . . they had nothing to do with real life.
This
is real life.” She gave a small shake of her head. “I should have stayed in California with Dad, where the only thing I’d have to think about was whether I’d put on enough sunscreen before I went to the pool. I don’t belong here. I’m no good at this. I’ve just been wasting my time and making your life harder.”

She started to stand, but Cici put a hand on her knee.

“The only way I got through college,” Cici said, “was by taking remedial algebra courses. Even then I barely passed. I had to take the real estate exam twice. It was the math. It’s always been hard for me. Of course, there was a lot of math in my line of work, and over the years it got easier, but it’s still a struggle. Even yesterday, building the chicken coop—we had to tear down everything we’d done, not because Bridget measured wrong but because I multiplied the fractions wrong. And I’ve been doing this for over twenty years.”

Lori was silent for a while. “Uncle Paul talked to you, didn’t he?”

Cici squeezed her knee. “He loves you, sweetheart. So do I. And I don’t ever want you to think you’re not good enough because you’re comparing yourself to someone else—even if that someone is me. Mothers
have
to pretend to be perfect, don’t you see that? If we didn’t, anarchy would rule the world. But most of the time we’re just doing the best we can, and trying to get better at it every day.”

Lori tried to smile. “It’s hard, when you don’t know where you fit in. Everyone else is good at something—Aunt Lindsay with her teaching and Aunt Bridget with her cooking and you building things and even the kid”—she jerked her head toward Noah—“at drawing. But me?” She shrugged. “All I’ve got is a bunch of dopey ideas.”

A note of motherly indignation tinged Cici’s voice. “You’re twenty years old! You have plenty of time to discover what it is you were meant to do in this world. And it doesn’t have to be just one thing, either. Leonardo da Vinci started out with nothing but a bunch of ‘dopey ideas,’ so did Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill and—and, well, Al Gore, for heaven’s sake! And look what
they
ended up contributing to the world!”

Lori slanted her an upwards grin. “The Internet?”

Cici put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her tight. “And please don’t ever let me hear you say again that you’ve made my life harder. You’ve made my life—and everyone else’s—richer by coming here. You’ve brought us adventure and inspiration and hope. You’ve reminded us how to think outside the box. You’ve made certain no two days are ever the same, and okay, so some of those days have been a little more exciting than we’d like, and maybe a little adventure goes a long way when you get to be our age, but . . .” She took Lori’s face in her hand and turned it toward her, regarding her seriously. “I am so glad you are here. And I’m sorry if I’ve tried to make you into something you’re not, or hold you up to a standard that doesn’t fit. You are a smart, imaginative, ambitious young woman, and I believe you can make your mark on the world with or without a college degree. Only you know what’s best for you. And whatever you choose, I’ll support you.”

Lori turned and wrapped her arms around her mother, hugging her fiercely. Cici returned the embrace until she felt tears stinging her eyes, and then she pushed away, swallowing the moisture in her throat, smoothing the damp curls away from Lori’s face. “Come on,” she said, “let’s give the others a hand.”

Noah was using a wide snow shovel to scrape debris out of the corners of the barn that Farley’s big plow had been unable to reach. Lori went behind him with the wheelbarrow, and when it was full, she carted it off to the trash pile where the women had taken over the digging of the trench. For almost an hour they worked in silence, then Lori observed in surprise, “Hey. There’s a stone floor under here. I never knew that. Let me see that shovel.”

Noah glared at her through bloodshot eyes and a face that was streaked with soot. He looked for a moment as though he would not comply and then, abruptly, handed it over.

“Did you tell your mom?” he demanded.

Lori scraped away a layer of dirt and ash from the floor, exposing another section of mortared stone. “Tell her what?”

“You know what.”

Lori looked up, regarding him frankly for a moment. “It’s not my job to tell her.”

His expression grew belligerent. “Nobody knows what started that fire.”

And Lori agreed mildly, “That’s right. Nobody does.”

“And nobody can prove a damn thing.”

The sound of the shovel raking over stone was the only reply as Lori cleared another four-foot section that was dusted with ash. And then the shovel struck something sharp sticking out of the ground. She thrust it back toward Noah and dropped to her knees, brushing the ground with her gloved hands until she uncovered a metal ring. “Hey, look at this. It’s like something they used to tie horses to.”

She tried to lift the ring, but it wouldn’t budge. She tried again, straining her shoulders, to no avail. “Bring that shovel back over here,” she said. “It’s buried or something.”

“So what if it is? We’re supposed to be cleaning out this junk.” But reluctantly, he returned with the shovel, and even helped her dig out the layers of packed dirt around the ring.

Less than ten minutes later they both stepped back, gazing at the six-foot panel of solid wood set into the stone floor, with the iron ring affixed to it in the center. “Will you look at that?” said Lori in amazement. “It’s a door! A trapdoor! I wonder what’s down there?”

“Spiders,” replied Noah.

“Mom, come here!” Lori called. “You won’t believe what we found! Aunt Lindsay, Aunt Bridget, come look at this!”

By the time the women arrived, Noah and Lori had used the metal ring to swing the door upward on a pair of powerful hinges. A couple of spiders did, in fact, scurry out, along with a surge of cool, damp air, but once they were gone, nothing more frightening was revealed inside than a set of sturdy stone steps.

“It’s like a castle dungeon,” said Bridget in awe. Her voice echoed as she leaned over the opening.

“Or a treasure cave,” agreed Lindsay, wide-eyed.

“What do you suppose it is?” Cici wondered.

“Maybe where they used to hide out from the Indians,” Noah suggested.

“Or where they hid the Confederate Treasury.” Bridget’s voice barely contained her excitement.

Lindsay shot a dry glance her way. “With our luck, it will be in Confederate bills.”

“Lori, run to the house and get some flashlights,” commanded Cici impatiently. “Hurry!”

And so, in an instant, the gray aftermath of disaster was transformed into a morning of adventure and possibility as, one flashlight beam at a time, they made their way down the stairs and into the vast cellar below.

“Smells like somebody puked down here,” observed Noah.

They stood close together at the bottom of the stairs, the slow sweeping beams of their light crossing and occasionally glinting off the round curves of something metal. Their voices echoed.

“Sour,” agreed Lindsay.

“More like moldy bread,” said Bridget.

“Oh, my goodness, I think I know what this place is,” Lori said excitedly. “It’s the cave where they used to age the cheese!”

Cici swept her light along the wall near the stairs, and found a switch. There was a buzzing and flickering overhead, and, one by one, a bank of fluorescent lights sequenced into life. They found themselves standing in a vast concrete room with a steel door at the far end, surrounded by giant, dusty steel vats with tubes and pipes connected to them.

Bridget gave a little shudder, her eyes wide as she looked around. “It’s like Frankenstein’s laboratory!”

“Nope,” said Cici. “It’s not a cheese cave either.” Smiling, she flicked off her flashlight. “It looks to me as though Noah and Lori have discovered what remains of the old Blackwell Farms winery.”

They bombarded Ida Mae with questions at lunch. Why hadn’t Ida Mae ever mentioned the winery beneath the barn? Why was it hidden away like that? Where did the steel door, which they had tried with all their strength to open, lead? Why had all that equipment been abandoned like that? How long had the place been closed up? And why had it been kept such a secret?

Ida Mae, complacently serving up homemade vegetable soup and fresh buttermilk cornbread, replied, “Weren’t no secret. You just never asked before.”

“I swear, you are
the
most exasperating woman!” Cici exclaimed. “All this time, a part of this county’s history has been sitting down there and you never said a word.”

“And not one single bottle of 1967 Shiraz with the original label,” Lindsay felt compelled to point out, a trifle fatalistically.

“Ida Mae is right, you know. We knew about the winery before we bought the house, but it never occurred to us to wonder where it was.”

“I wonder if the equipment is worth anything.”

“Maybe.” Cici tasted her soup. “We could do some research, try to sell it on eBay or something.”

“What I don’t understand,” Lori said, “is why they put a winery in the cellar of a barn.”

Ida Mae gave her a disparaging look. “You ever hear of Prohibition?”

Cici put down her spoon, her eyes growing bright with interest. So did Bridget and Lindsay. “Do you mean . . .”

Ida Mae nodded smugly. “Everybody thinks the Blackwells made their money in phosphates, but that was just the start. It was bootleg whiskey that built their fortune. Hear tell that door you found used to be in the floor of the chicken house, the last place the law would go looking for a speakeasy—or a distillery.”

She sat down at the kitchen table and sampled her soup. “Good soup,” she commented, “if I do say so myself.”

“Ida Mae!” Lori practically squealed. “Is that all you have to say? Tell us more!”

“Ain’t nothing more to tell.”

“Are you serious?” Bridget demanded. “There used to be a speakeasy in the cellar of our barn and you say there’s nothing more to tell?”

“What about the door?” Noah, who had been pretending disinterest in the entire conversation, spoke up for the first time. “Was that some kind of secret escape route in case of raids?”

Ida Mae chewed a morsel of cornbread for an inordinately long period of time. “The door,” she said at last, “was put in when they decided to make wine down there. Couldn’t exactly carry all them grapes and barrels and stuff down the stairs, so they cut a door in the hill down by the orchard. All they had to do was drive the trucks up and unload.”

“I know the hill she’s talking about!” Bridget exclaimed. “Where the raspberries are planted, right?” And then she frowned. “But I never saw a door there.”

“It would be all overgrown now,” Cici said. “That’s probably why we couldn’t get it open, too. Ida Mae—”