FINDING HER LAND

The stack of boxes overwhelms Vicky, and she wants to quit sorting and let herself sob. She's downsizing to an apartment. She lost her job six months ago and doesn't start the new one for another two. The utilities are near disconnection, and she's behind in the mortgage, student loans, and car payment. So she's selling her house and someone is interested.

She saves everything, so there are kindergarten paintings and math scribblers. A junior-high report has a B mark. No academic awards or gym trophies. There's nothing important here.

She finds a sketch of an old farmhouse and pauses. Her thoughts wander to the summer she was ten years old, and that specific house.

It's haunted, her friends said. Something bad happened there. Her grandmother warns her to stay away from it, but this only intrigues Vicky. It's far in a field and she walks around it many days. It's not scary. It's just an old house.

She goes closer. The door and some windows are boarded over, but one window is an open hole. She stumbles on bricks fallen from the walls and frightened pigeons fly out of a hole in the roof. With a stick she removes the spider webs from the window square and crawls through the rotted frame. Glass crunches under her shoes.

Wallpaper sags in the living room, and there's a ragged couch with stuffing that bulges out. In the kitchen, some cupboard doors have broken hinges and hang open. She steps between broken dishes. The chimney has caved in and sunlight comes through. Feathers are everywhere.

Going up the stairs she avoids broken boards and ends up in two bedrooms. One has a rusted bed that is covered with a mouse-eaten sheet, and a dresser with a cracked mirror. Crumpled clothes lay on the dirty floor.

The other room has a mattress on the floor. A mouse scurries out of a hole in it. She gasps as it disappears into the wall. There's a small table, with a rickety wooden box that could have been used as a chair. Pencils are in the dust under it. Across from the mattress is a crib.

The closet has droopy kid's clothing and a high shelf. On the shelf is a shoebox. She pushes the wooden box against the wall and uses both hands to pull out the soft cardboard. As she steps down she glimpses something sticking out from behind a board, but the cardboard is falling apart so she gets down.

In it are faded school papers and coloring books. But the yellowed pages have mouse poop on them. "Yuck". She wipes her hands on her pants and uses a dusty pencil to lift up and look at the other papers. Just kid stuff. At the bottom are crayons and a black-and-white photograph of a little girl holding a cat, that has funny facial markings. Mice have chewed the edges but she can tell the girl is younger than she is. She keeps the photograph and a school report card. No one else is going to use them.

Before she pushes the box back, she looks at the thing sticking out in the dark corner. It's probably wallpaper. No, it's hard. Some tugs pull it out enough to show that it's a book cover, but it's stuck.

With a brick, she bangs on the board until it splits apart. A black book drops onto the shelf and falls open. Loose papers and photographs fall out of it. If someone hid this, it must be a treasure. The box wobbles under her feet and she grabs everything with both hands as it collapses. She hits the floor and the papers scatter.

Lying on her back, dust and feathers float around and stick to her clothes and hair. Her palm has scraped the floor and stings, and her jeans have ripped on one knee. Grandma will ask her what she's been up to. Sore, she slowly gets up and dusts off. She feels icky. It's time to get out of here. She stuffs everything into the book and shoves it into the pocket of her hoodie.

As expected, grandma quizzes her. She says she fell down near the creek, knowing she'll get a lecture for being there as well. Grandma shakes her head and tells Vicky to wash up and change her clothes. The booklet goes under her dresser.

As they eat sandwiches, Vicky asks about the house. Grandma looks at her and sighs.

"It's a terrible story, but I guess you're old enough. They were the Zuskora family. I think the mother was Emily, and there were a baby boy and a young girl. The father had a temper. An extremely bad temper." She stops. "We saw the police rush there, but the father was gone, the mother and baby were dead, and the little girl was unconscious in her closet, arms around her cat."

Vicky's eyes widen. "Murders, in that house"?

Grandma nods. "An ambulance took the girl. No one knows if she survived. If she did, she probably went to an orphanage. A pretty, quiet child. No one heard of them again. The mother might have had family far away, but they had no family here, so the town buried them. A neighbor took in the cat. Such an unbelievable tragedy."

In her bedroom Vicky wipes the book and flattens the papers she wrinkled. The book cover has gold letters in the name Elia. She thinks to write the name Emily, inside the cover. The words in the book are printed in pencil, some are misspelled, but she can read that Elia was afraid of her father, and wished her mom could move her and the baby to Oma's farm where they could pet the sheep.

These are drawings of the cat and princesses with huge dresses. Two loose papers are letters from the Oma and Opa. They ask if she likes her happy birthday notebook, talk about their farm, and want her to visit. There is a photograph of them surrounded by sheep, at their farm.

Vicky doesn't understand the other papers. A ship's name and sets of numbers. Boring! The book is not a treasure. It all goes in a plastic bag and under a dance costume because if grandma sees it she'll know Vicky was in that house. Her friend Holly comes over and they go for ice cream.

Now it's twenty years later, and Vicky holds her painting of that house. Could that black notebook be in one of these boxes? Maybe, and she has to sort through them anyway. It's suppertime, but there's only one more box. It's full of outdated receipts that go into the garbage. She brings out the last one and there it is, the book, still in the bag. It's smaller than she remembers.

On the kitchen table, she carefully touches the brittle pages. There's the photo of Elia holding the cat that has unusual black circles around the nose. The school report has her birth date. As an adult who also lost her mother, Vicky studies the photographs and scrutinizes the letters differently than the ten-year-old did.

This is irreplaceable information.

A gut feeling pushes her to search further, and to do it now. She's finished with the boxes and has time. Since foster children's files are confidential, that's an end. But an easy place to look is on Facebook. Nothing.

Repeated searches through federal archives and two genealogy sites bring no results. If Elia is alive, she might have a married name. That's another end. It's midnight. Enough now.

In the morning and with a coffee, she tries a different approach. The letter envelopes have return names and addresses. They're faded and have black postoffice stamps across them. A magnifying glass brings out legible bits, and she compares both envelopes. They're from Austria. Using other legible letters and online maps, they might be from an area called Carinthia.

The return names are almost illegible but they don't start with a Z. Are these the mother's family? She writes the legible letters, and randomly fills in the blanks to create names, but none show up in the searches. She checks ship passenger lists, but no luck.

Three days she's at it. But she's thankful for this focus because it stops her own worries. Where else can she look? On a large grave website, she doesn't find Elia or Emily. Then she looks through major newspaper obituary archives within a thousand miles. Nope. It's frustrating and a waste of time. Then she notices the classified option. Lawyers place notices there when people pass away. Back to each newspaper.

Curiously, she finds a recent ad for a woman with the last name that has two letters different than any name she's created, and the first name is not Emily, it's Emylia. She tries the genealogy sites with that name. A result comes up with a death year. The ad has a phone number and a reply deadline. There's little chance that this relates to her notebook, but she leaves a message.

A call comes immediately. The trustee partners with a firm in Carinthia, Austria.

Wow!

This is the third ad he's placed. They exchange pieces of information and he wants to meet, but he's three hours away.

The next day he comes with a large folder. Vicky is hesitant to give out private information until he can prove he's genuine. He has a birth certificate for Emylia, who came here as a single, young woman. Her sister Sophie passed away a year ago and they are searching for an heir to a large piece of land. His recent farm pictures don't match her old one, but when they compare pictures of the parents, these are the same people. She informs him he's looking for a granddaughter that's disappeared and tells the story.

The trustee places another ad with the name Elia Zuskora.

A man reads the ad and sits back, stunned. That's his daughter's name, but she doesn't know that was her name. She was in a coma before they adopted her and they received a brief history. She was frail and vulnerable, and they changed her name to protect her from her father. Her name is Alyssa, and her only memory before the coma is of a cat. She's a happy teacher, and this could ruin that happiness.

He's a widower, so this heavy decision is his, and telling her is the right thing. He phones her.

As she makes tea he wonders how to start. He has her real birth certificate. She's confused.

"Why show me this now?"

He gives her the ad. "Careful. This could be a terrible experience".

She sits quietly, then sees his worried wrinkles and hugs him. "Would it hurt you if I answered?" He shakes his head. "Then I'll reply if you come with me."

They meet the trustee and after a discussion, he asks if Vicky can join them. She brings the book and papers. He spreads everything on the desk. Elia, or Alyssa, sees the photograph of herself with the cat and starts sobbing. Vicky tells her it had a caring home.

The trustee shows Alyssa a photograph of her mother when she left Austria. Alyssa is older than her mother was in that photograph, but they could be sisters. There's an examination of birth certificates and documents. She is definitely the heir.

The trustee hands Vicky an envelope. It's a bank draft for $20,000.

"What?"

"That's arranged compensation for assistance. We would never have found her without you."

Alyssa nods and smiles as she grips the black book and the photographs.

They exchange emails and Vickey leaves. She's flying high. Elia has her farm, and she doesn't need to sell her house. She ignores the boxes and hums for the rest of the day.

The End