[Childhood pastimes]

She spent her days riding back and forth from the farm to the library. As
she worked at the mystery of where the furniture had come from, she was ever
more glad that her mother and aunt had never managed to get the farm cleaned
up and working right. They did alright, selling jellies and fruit in the
summer, and trading for what they could. Never enough time to get more than
the front fields cleared, pruning the existing trees. The back acres lay
fallow and she liked it that way. She had her private piece of history right
there and it was hers to follow as she liked.

She'd had a lot of freedom living with her father in the city, but she was
happy to find this new kind living here. It wasn't freedom to go any place
she liked, any time, running unattended, but instead freedom to learn and
persue what she liked without interference. No strange job interrupting her,
no errand to be run, no bustle of city traffic and people asking her why she
wasn't in school.

The furniture locked up in the shed on the north end of the property, the
lists of names in the hidden room in the attic, the letter found hiddent in
the dressing table, she had the sense that the pieces all fit together, if
only because none of the pieces fit in a farm on the outskirts of a small
town.

She thumbed through her notebook, looking at the tracings of the names she'd
found, and trying to imagine just how they got there.

She'd discovered a box of paperwork that had come with the sale of the farm
to her aunt, and she thumbed through it looking for clues. Bill of sale,
sold at auction for what she realized was a tiny sum. A new and an old copy
of the title deed.  The old copy caught her eye. The handwriting looked
familiar, and she pulled out her notebook and thumbed through it. 

"Eleanor Jacobovicz" was scrawled in the seller's name. The purchaser was
scrawled just "J. White", and an illegible signature, and then the seal of
the county clerk. She found the list of names in her notebook and scanned
down, and there, in an undeniably similar hand was the name "Jonas White".

Someone who'd penned their name into the wood of the hidden room was the
next owner of the house. She bit her lip and tucked the old paper into her
notebook and got ready to head back into town.